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Canapes of Crab
Take six slices of bread, cut off the crusts, and fry the slices to a light brown with a part of butter. Take the lower shell from a few crabs, and pick out the meat from the body and claws; place the meat on a plate, season with salt and pepper, and mince up well. Put one ounce of butter in a saucepan with a chopped onion, cook for a few minutes, but do not let the onion brown. Stir in two tablespoonfuls of flour, then one gill of broth, add the crab meat, cook and continue stirring for fifteen minutes. Have a tablespoonful of butter in a saucepan on a hot stove, mix in one tablespoonful of flour, and cook slowly for three minutes; add two ounces of grated Parmesan cheese, and the same quantity of grated Gruyere; stir together and turn into a basin to cool. Spread a layer of the forcemeat on each slice of toast. Divide the cheese into six equal parts, roll each into a ball, range it in the center, over the layer of forcemeat. Place them on a flat dish, and bake in the brisk oven for five or six minutes. When ready take the dish out of the oven and serve at once.
A hot cheese-and-crab canapé from the Waldorf's à la carte repertoire. Two separate mixtures are built here, and the second one behaves oddly by modern standards, so read both through before starting.
- The cheese ball is a stiff paste, not a sauceButter and flour cooked three minutes with two ounces each of Parmesan and Gruyère stirred in, and no liquid at all, gives a thick putty. It must be cooled until firm before you can roll it into balls, so make it first and let it sit while you prepare the crab. If it is too soft to shape, refrigerate it.
- A gillHalf a cup, four fluid ounces. That is the only liquid in the crab forcemeat and it will thicken almost immediately against two tablespoons of flour.
- Fifteen minutes of stirringWith this little broth the mixture becomes a paste well before the time is up, and long cooking does the picked crab no favors. Cook until it holds together and pulls from the pan, five to eight minutes, adding broth by the spoonful if it tightens too far. It needs to be stiff enough to spread on toast without running.
- How much crab"A few crabs" is genuinely open-ended and depends on the size of the crab. Aim for about 8 ounces of picked meat for six slices; lump or claw meat from a tub works and saves the picking.
- Brisk ovenConventionally read as a hot oven, somewhere around 400 to 450F. Five or six minutes is only to melt and blister the cheese, so the oven must already be fully hot when the dish goes in. A minute under the broiler will give more browning if the cheese is still pale.
- Fried bread, then called toastThe bread is fried in butter to a light brown, and the recipe then refers to it as toast throughout. Fry it; the butter-crisped surface holds up under the wet forcemeat where dry toast will soften.
- SeasoningTwo kinds of hard cheese bring most of the salt. Season the crab lightly and taste the forcemeat before spreading.
- YieldSix canapés, enough for six as a first course or three as a light lunch. They must go to the table straight from the oven; the cheese sets hard as it cools.
Oscar Tschirky ran the Waldorf's dining rooms from 1893, and the vocabulary here shows the French professional grammar on which American hotel cooking of the period was built: forcemeat for the minced, bound crab mixture, and canapé in the sense of a small piece of fried or toasted bread used as a base for something savory, rather than the modern catch-all for any passed hors d'oeuvre. Parmesan and Gruyère were both imported, putting two kinds of expense on one small square of bread. The cheese-and-flour mixture is essentially a roux carrying as much grated cheese as it will hold, which can be shaped in advance and melted to order during service.