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Olive and Anchovy Canapes
Stone and peel some olives, being sure to keep their shape as much as possible; wash an equal number of anchovies and coil an anchovy around each olive. Cut as many rounds of bread as there are olives and toast them lightly on both sides; butter them while they are hot and put an olive on each. Spread a dish paper over a hot dish, arrange the toast on it, garnish with a border of fresh well-washed water-cresses, and serve. This dish is much used for luncheons,
A two-ingredient canapé that lives or dies on assembly: the toast must be buttered hot and topped at the last minute, or the rounds go limp before they reach the table.
- "Stone and peel"Stoning is pitting. "Peel" here most likely means paring the flesh away from the pit in one continuous spiral with a small sharp knife, so the olive keeps its outline when reassembled around the anchovy, though the text does not spell the operation out. Large green olives -- queen or gordal size -- are the easiest to work with; modern pitted olives can be substituted.
- AnchoviesThe instruction to wash them suggests salt-packed anchovies, which are rinsed and filleted before use. Oil-packed fillets from a tin need no washing, only blotting. One fillet coils around one olive; two if the fillets are small.
- No added saltBoth components are heavily cured. Use unsalted butter and skip seasoning entirely.
- Bread roundsThe recipe does not give a size; a small cutter, roughly the diameter of the olives, from firm white bread with crusts off suits the dish. The text says only to toast lightly on both sides, so a broiler or oven gives more even colour than a toaster.
- Dish paperA pierced lace paper doily laid on the serving platter, standard in hotel service to absorb butter and dress the plate. Any paper doily or a folded napkin does the same job.
- Hot dish, cold garnishWarm the platter as directed, but add the watercress border only as the dish goes out, since the heat will wilt it.
- Yield and timingFigure two to three canapés per person as a first course; a dozen olives serves four to six. Assemble within ten minutes of serving.
Oscar Tschirky, the Swiss-born maître d'hôtel known to New York simply as Oscar of the Waldorf, published his Cook Book in 1896, and it reads as a record of what a large American hotel kitchen of the 1890s actually sent out. Canapés — French for a couch or sofa, the bread being, by the conventional explanation, the seat on which the garnish rests — were then a relatively new arrival on English-language menus, part of the wholesale adoption of French service in Gilded Age hotels and clubs. The olive-and-anchovy pairing belongs to the older tradition of salty hors d'oeuvre intended to sharpen the appetite and, not incidentally, encourage drinking; Oscar notes that it is "much used for luncheons." Salt-packed anchovies and barrelled Spanish olives were both staple imports by this date, exotic enough to look deliberate on a plate.