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Egg Canapes
Put into a saucepan of water four eggs and boil for ten minutes, or until quite hard; then peel off the shells, cut the eggs in halves, remove the yolks and chop them up. Soak two anchovies, dry and remove the bones and chop them up with three truffles and six capers; mix in the chopped yolks, add a seasoning of salt, pepper and cayenne and one teaspoonful of tarragon vinegar. Fill the halves of eggs with this mixture, place each one on a piece of fried bread, heat in the oven and serve very hot.
A hot stuffed-egg canapé of the sort that came off the Waldorf's garde-manger by the hundred. Nothing here is difficult; the details worth attention are the anchovies, the truffles and the very brief trip through the oven.
- The hinge: heat, do not bakeThe eggs are already cooked. The oven is only to warm the filling and crisp the bread, so a moderate oven and a few minutes is all that is wanted. Longer and the whites turn tough and weep.
- AnchoviesOscar means salt-packed fillets, which is why they are soaked and boned. Modern oil-packed fillets need neither: rinse, pat dry, and use two fillets. Two salt-packed whole anchovies would be four fillets, so adjust to taste.
- TrufflesThree truffles in hotel practice of this period would most likely have been small black truffles, often tinned or otherwise preserved. Fresh black truffle at current prices is not proportionate here; a teaspoon of finely chopped preserved truffle, or truffle peelings with a little of their juice, is a reasonable substitute.
- Ten minutes is enough, barelyTen minutes at a full boil will hard-cook a large egg and can green the yolk rim. Since the yolks are chopped and mixed anyway any discoloration is cosmetic, but slightly less time, off the heat in covered water, gives a cleaner yolk.
- Tarragon vinegarStill sold, and easy to make by steeping tarragon in white wine vinegar for a week. One teaspoon across four yolks is assertive; add half, taste, then finish.
- The fried breadCut rounds slightly larger than the egg half and fry in clarified butter until golden on both sides. Shave a flat sliver off the bottom of each egg half so it sits still on the crouton.
- SeasoningAnchovy and capers bring most of the salt. Season the filling at the end, and treat the cayenne as a pinch rather than a measure.
- YieldEight canapés — four servings as a first course, or one small round of hors d'oeuvre for eight.
Canapés like this belong to the hotel service over which Oscar Tschirky presided as maître d'hôtel at the Waldorf in the 1890s, where the savoury little mouthful on fried bread was a familiar part of a formal menu and of a supper buffet. The word canapé is generally traced to the French for couch or sofa, the bread being the seat on which the garnish sits, and by the end of the nineteenth century it had become a fixed term of professional kitchen French. The flavour combination here — anchovy, caper, truffle, tarragon vinegar — is pure garde-manger of the period: strong, salty, and built from preserved goods that kept in a hotel larder rather than from anything seasonal. Truffles appear casually in this book because tinned truffle and truffle peelings were a standard commercial pantry item then, used in restaurants far more freely than the price of fresh truffle today would suggest.