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Olives Stuffed with Anchovies
Stone a dozen Spanish olives; wash and bone five anchovies, chop them finely, put them in a mortar with a moderate quantity each of chopped onion and parsley, pound them smoothly and season with a small quantity of cayenne pepper. Fill the hollows of the olives left by the stones with the pounded mixture, Cut a few slices of bread and scoop a hollow in the center of each round; put a large piece of lard in a stewpan on the fire, and when it boils put in the rounds of bread and fry them until they are brown. Afterwards drain, then leave them until they are cool, and place an olive in the middle of each. Arrange them on a dish, pour over a small quantity of mayonnaise sauce and serve.
An hors d'oeuvre from the Waldorf's canapé repertoire: stuffed olives set into fried bread croustades. The work is all in the anchovy paste and in frying the bread crisp enough to hold up under mayonnaise.
- Scale and yieldA dozen olives makes a dozen canapés, enough for four to six people as a passed appetizer. The anchovy paste is easily doubled and keeps a couple of days covered in the refrigerator.
- AnchoviesSalt-packed anchovies needed washing and boning in 1896. Modern oil-packed fillets are already boned; drain them and skip the soaking, or they will lose what flavor they have.
- Olives"Spanish olives" means green Manzanilla or Queen olives in brine. Buy them whole and pit them yourself with a cherry pitter or the flat of a knife; pre-stuffed pimiento olives leave no usable cavity.
- The mortarA mortar and pestle gives the smoothest paste, but a small food processor works. The mixture should be a thick paste, not a purée — add the onion sparingly, since raw onion turns watery and bitter as it sits.
- Frying fat"A large piece of lard" is not a measured quantity; use enough melted fat for shallow frying in a small pan. Any neutral oil does the same job, and in properly hot fat the bread browns quickly.
- The hollowed breadCut rounds from firm day-old white bread with a 1"-1" cutter, then press a depression with a smaller cutter or the end of a wooden spoon without cutting through. Day-old bread holds its shape better in the fat.
- Assembly timingThe bread must be fully cool and the mayonnaise applied at the last minute; dressed croustades soften quickly.
- SeasoningNo salt is called for and none is needed — anchovies and brined olives supply plenty. Taste the paste before stuffing.
Oscar Tschirky, the Swiss-born maître d'hôtel whose name became shorthand for the Waldorf's dining rooms, published The Cook Book by "Oscar" of the Waldorf in 1896, a vast compendium aimed at both hotel kitchens and ambitious households. Small savories like this one belong to the era's hors d'oeuvre variés, the tray of cold bites that opened a long menu, and they show the French service vocabulary that governed American luxury hotels at the time: the fried bread round is a croustade, a shape borrowed from classic garnish work and repurposed as a stand for a single olive. The pairing of anchovy and green olive is older than the recipe and much older than the hotel — both were staples of the Mediterranean salt trade — but their appearance on a Fifth Avenue supper tray reflects the late-nineteenth-century American appetite for imported Spanish olives, which arrived in barrels of brine and were sold loose by grocers.