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Canapes of Lobster
Spread with lobster butter a few thin slices of bread fried in butter; leave for two hours some slices of lobster in a marinade of oil, vinegar, salt and pepper. Take them out, set them in the middle of the bread and place a group of capers on each piece.
A cold hors d'oeuvre built on three components, only one of which the original bothers to explain. Read it as an assembly job: fried bread, compound butter, marinated lobster.
- The lobster must already be cookedOscar assumes a kitchen with boiled lobster on hand, and the oil-and-vinegar marinade is for flavour, not for "cooking" the meat. Use meat from a boiled or steamed lobster, chilled and sliced into medallions from the tail.
- Lobster butterMade by pounding the shells and coral with softened butter, warming gently, then straining through muslin and chilling so the tinted butter sets and any liquid can be poured off. Proportions are a matter of judgement; something like 4 oz butter to the shells of one lobster is a common working ratio. A quick substitute is butter creamed with a spoonful of tomato paste and a pinch of cayenne, though it is thinner in flavour.
- The marinadeThe recipe gives no proportions; something near three parts oil to one of vinegar, seasoned, will do. Two hours is on the long side for delicate lobster; an hour is plenty, and the slices should be drained and blotted before they go on the bread or they will sog it.
- Fried breadThin slices of a close-crumbed white loaf, crusts off, fried in clarified butter until crisp on both sides and drained. Whole butter burns before the bread colours evenly. Cut into rounds or fingers after frying, not before.
- Assemble lateButtered fried bread stays crisp perhaps twenty minutes under a moist topping. Fry the bread ahead, keep it dry, and spread and top just before serving.
- CapersNonpareil capers in brine, rinsed and dried. Salt-packed capers need a longer soak or they will overwhelm the lobster.
- YieldThe original quantifies nothing beyond 'a few thin slices', so scale is guesswork: one good-sized lobster and half a small loaf would give roughly 24 canapes, enough for eight to ten people as part of a spread.
Oscar Tschirky ran the dining rooms of the Waldorf, and later the Waldorf-Astoria, through the decades when the elaborate French service of Escoffier's generation set the standard for American hotel cooking. Canapes belong to that world: small savouries handed round before the meal proper or served as one of the opening cold dishes, typically built on a fried or toasted bread base, though biscuits and crackers were used as well. The beurre de homard called for here is a standard item of the classical kitchen larder, a way of extracting colour and flavour from shells that would otherwise be discarded, and its presence in a one-sentence recipe tells you who the book was written for. Oscar's Cook Book of 1896 runs to hundreds of such entries, each assuming a reader who already knows the underlying preparations and needs only to be reminded of the arrangement on the plate.