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Sardine Canapés
6 portions prepared bread
Worcestershire sauce
6 large sardines
Pickled beets
Juice of I lemon
6 large olives
Salt
24 thin slices lemon
Remove skin and backbone. Flake the sardines with a fork and season with lemon-juice, salt and a few drops of Worcestershire sauce. Spread the prepared bread with this mixture and decorate by placing in the center of each canapé a small circle of pickled beet. Cut a slice from the end of a large olive so that it will stand firmly and place this in the center of the beet. A narrow border of finely chopped beet may be placed around the edge of the canapé with good effect. Garnish the plate with four thin slices of lemon placed symmetrically.
A cold assembly job rather than a cooked dish, so the only real variables are the bread and the quality of the fish. Everything can be prepared an hour ahead except the spreading.
- "Prepared bread"In period canapé recipes this normally means bread cut into rounds or small shapes with crusts removed, and usually toasted or fried in butter and cooled; the book does not define it here. Untoasted bread softens quickly under an oily fish spread.
- The sardines"large sardines" most likely means the oil-packed tinned fish of the period, generally bigger than the tiny brisling sold today, though the recipe does not say. A small tin of good oil-packed sardines will cover six canapés; drain them before mashing or the spread will slide.
- Skin and backboneModern tinned sardines have soft, edible bones and skin, so removing them is optional. If you do lift out the backbone, do it with the fish still whole rather than after flaking.
- Seasoning by tasteThe juice of a whole lemon will drown six sardines. Add it a teaspoon at a time, taste, and go carefully with the salt as tinned sardines are already salted.
- Pickled beetSliced pickled beets from a jar work directly; pat them dry on paper towel or the purple juice will bleed across the spread.
- The oliveCut the base flat, as directed, and use a firm brine-cured green olive. A soft black olive will not stand and will stain the beet.
- Yield and timingSix canapés; the twenty-four lemon slices at four per plate imply six individual plates, one canapé each. Assemble no more than half an hour before serving; the bread softens quickly once the spread is on.
- The lemon garnishThe twenty-four slices are plate decoration, four per serving plate, not part of the canapé. Cut them paper-thin from an unwaxed lemon.
Canapés of this kind belong to a vogue in American entertaining, often placed roughly in the decades around the turn of the twentieth century, for a small course served early in formal dinners — by some accounts before the soup — and Butterick's household books were aimed squarely at the middle-class hostess trying to reproduce that formality at home. Tinned sardines made it possible: cheap, shelf-stable, imported in quantity from France and Portugal and later canned domestically in Maine, they gave a cook something that read as luxurious without a fishmonger. The elaborate stacking here — beet circle, standing olive, chopped beet border, symmetrical lemon slices — is characteristic of the period's approach to cold food, where visual construction did the work that seasoning does now. The bread is conventionally said to be the seat on which the garnish sits.