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Eggs and Caviar Canapes
Cut a French roll into slices of moderate thickness and butter them; spread over each a layer of Russian caviar and squeeze over a little lemon juice. Boil some eggs till hard and when cold peel and cut into slices; lay a slice of egg on each slice of roll and press them slightly together. Put the canapes on a dish with a folded napkin or a dish-paper, garnish them with green parsley and serve. A very small quantity of finely minced parsley strewn over the top of the eggs will be found an improvement.
A cold canapé that needs almost no technique, which means the few decisions it does involve — bread, egg, and how long the assembled rounds sit — are the whole dish.
- The French rollA "French roll" at this date was generally a small crusty white roll rather than a baguette; a demi-baguette or a soft-crumbed dinner roll sliced about 1/4 inch thick works. Slices much thicker than that swamp the caviar and make the canapé awkward to eat in one bite.
- Butter to the edgesThe butter is a moisture barrier as much as a flavour, so bring it fully to room temperature and spread it right out to the crust. Bare bread under caviar goes soggy within minutes.
- Hard-boiled eggs"Boil till hard" in period cookery could mean fifteen minutes or more, which produces the grey-green ring and chalky yolk. Ten to twelve minutes from boiling, then straight into cold water, gives a firm yolk that still slices cleanly.
- Slicing the eggCut the eggs crosswise with a wet thin-bladed knife or an egg slicer, and use the broad centre slices for the canapés. The tapered ends are best chopped and saved for something else.
- CaviarRussian caviar here means sturgeon roe, now expensive and tightly regulated; farmed sturgeon caviar, or trout, salmon or lumpfish roe, all sit correctly under the egg. Spread rather than heap it, and add the lemon juice sparingly — acid dulls the roe's colour and firmness if it stands.
- "Press them slightly together"A light press only, enough to seat the egg in the caviar. Any real pressure crushes the roe and pushes it out at the sides.
- Serving vesselA dish-paper is a doily-like paper liner; a folded linen napkin does the same job of keeping the canapés from sliding. Both are period presentation, not function you need to reproduce.
- Timing and yieldAssemble within half an hour of serving and keep cold. One small roll yields roughly eight to ten canapés, enough for three or four people as part of a spread.
Canap\-nineteenth-century service that Oscar Tschirky oversaw at the Waldorf: small cold savouries handed with the first wine or set out at a buffet supper, made to be eaten standing. The word canap\a settee, applied to a piece of bread that serves as a seat for whatever is laid on it. Caviar reached New York dining rooms in quantity in this period — imported sturgeon roe from Russia was a fixture of hotel menus, and it is often said that American sturgeon fisheries on the Delaware and the Hudson supplied roe cheaply enough that it turned up in barrooms as a salty accompaniment to beer, though the story is popular history more than documented record, and the Delaware fishery was in steep decline by the later 1890s. The pairing with hard-boiled egg, lemon and parsley reflects accompaniments commonly served with caviar in the Russian manner, reduced to a single mouthful, and Oscar gives no quantities at all: it was written for cooks who already knew what a plate of canapés should look like.