Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Canapes
Canapes
Cut several thin slices of bread, remove the crusts and toast them till they are of an even brown. Butter slightly and spread with any kind of potted meat or fish. Put two slices together, and cut them in long strips. They afford a tasty dish for tea or supper parties.
A tea-table filler rather than a formal recipe: the only real variables are the bread, the toast colour and what goes between. Everything here turns on assembling at the last minute.
- Timing is the hingeToast, spread and cut within a few minutes of serving. Buttered toast spread with a moist potted meat turns leathery on the outside and damp underneath within half an hour.
- What "potted meat or fish" meantA cooked meat, game, ham, tongue or fish pounded to a paste with butter and spices, packed into a pot and sealed with clarified butter. The nearest modern equivalents are potted shrimp, rillettes, liver pâté, or a tinned fish mashed with softened butter and lemon.
- Old potted goods, though, are not a templatePeriod potted meats were preserved under a butter seal and kept for weeks in a cool larder. Anything you make now should be treated as a fresh refrigerated pâté and eaten within a few days.
- The breadA firm, close-grained white sandwich loaf, cut about a quarter inch thick. Open-crumb artisan bread tears when you spread it and will not cut into clean strips.
- "Even brown"Both sides, uniformly, with no pale patches or scorched edges. If you are browning a dozen slices at once, an oven rack may give you more even results than a toaster.
- Butter slightlyThe butter is a moisture barrier, not a flavour layer. Spread it thin on hot toast so it melts in, then let the toast cool a moment before the filling goes on.
- These are closed, not open-facedTwo slices together makes what we would now call a toast sandwich, cut into fingers. If you want the open canapé of later cocktail service, use one slice and garnish the top.
- YieldEach pair of standard slices gives four to five strips, so about six slices of bread — three sandwiches — for a dozen pieces. Reckon on three or four per person alongside other things.
Canapé is French for a sofa or couch, the idea being that the garnish reclines on its bit of bread; the word was firmly in English culinary use by the late nineteenth century, when small savouries on toast were a fixture of tea, supper and after-theatre service. Oscar Tschirky, the maître d'hôtel whose name this 1896 book carries, was writing for a hotel kitchen where such items had to be produced fast and in quantity. Potting — pounding cooked meat or fish with butter and sealing it under more butter — was a British preserving method of long standing that survived into the era of refrigeration as a flavour, not a necessity, and jars of commercial potted ham, tongue and shrimp were widely sold when this recipe was written. That a hotel cookbook of the period would cheerfully say "any kind of potted meat or fish" says a good deal about how ordinary the stuff then was.