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Tricolor Canapes
Skin and bone six anchovies, pound them in a mortar and pass them through a fine wire sieve. Boil three eggs until they are hard, separate the whites from the yolks and pass them separately through the sieve. Care must be taken in preparing these ingredients not to get the colors mixed. Cut four slices of bread, trim off the crusts, and cut each slice into two square pieces. Put a strip of the hard-boiled white of an egg on a piece of fried bread, next a strip of finely-chopped gherkins or capers, and next a strip of the yolk of eggs, thus making three colors on one piece of bread. Proceed in like manner with the rest. Spread a fancy dish-paper or a folded napkin over a dish, arrange the canapes neatly on it, placing here and there a few sprigs of parsley and serve.
Caviar on Toast Prepare six rounds of toast of white bread. Place in a saucepan two large tablespoonfuls of caviar and one tablespoonful of cream, heat for a minute or two at one side of the fire, stirring carefully meanwhile. Pour this mixture over the toast and serve on a dish with a folded napkin.
Two small hors d'oeuvre from the Waldorf's service kitchen, printed together. Both are assembly jobs, and the only real technique is in the caviar.
- The missing anchovyThe text has you pound and sieve six anchovies, then never mentions them again. The likeliest reading is that they were meant as a thin anchovy puree spread on the fried bread as the base under the three stripes, though the recipe never says so; if you use them that way, use them sparingly, since sieved salt anchovy is very strong.
- Fried bread, not toastThe bread is cut and trimmed in one sentence and called "fried bread" in the next. Fry the squares in clarified butter until crisp on both sides and cool them completely, or the egg and gherkin will slide.
- Sieving without a sieveA fine wire sieve gives hard-boiled egg a light, even crumb. A box grater's fine side or a potato ricer does the same. Wipe the tool between white and yolk, which is what the warning about mixing colors is about.
- The stripesAim for three parallel bands of roughly equal width across each square: white, chopped green, yellow. Drain the gherkins or capers well on a towel first; brine bleeding into the egg ruins the line.
- YieldFour slices cut in two make eight canapés, one or two apiece as a pre-dinner bite. Three eggs and six anchovies is generous for eight; scale the eggs to the bread rather than the reverse.
- "At one side of the fire"This means the cooler edge of a coal range, i.e. gentle heat. On a modern burner, the lowest setting for a minute is enough. Caviar that boils bursts and turns to salty gray paste, so warm it only until the cream loosens.
- Caviar quantitiesTwo large tablespoonfuls over six rounds of toast is thin coverage. Sturgeon caviar is not what it was in 1896, and a good salmon or trout roe will behave much the same in the pan.
- ServingThe folded napkin or dish-paper under the canapes will also absorb butter and keep the bases from sitting in grease. A doubled paper napkin on the platter does the job.
Oscar Tschirky ran the dining rooms of the Waldorf from its opening in 1893, and his 1896 Cook Book reads as a working record of what a large American hotel kitchen was expected to produce at the height of French service. Canapés belong to that moment: small savory pieces of fried or toasted bread, the name generally traced to the French for a couch or covering, the bread being the seat for whatever sits on it. The tricolor idea, three ingredients laid in bands of white, green and yellow, was a standard garde-manger exercise, and cookbooks of the period offered such colored arrangements, built from ingredients like hard-boiled egg, anchovy, beetroot, truffle and pickle. Caviar on toast on the same page shows the other half of the hotel's range, an imported luxury served in a spoonful or two, at a time when Russian caviar and cheap domestic sturgeon roe from the Delaware and Hudson were both moving through New York in quantity.