No. 827

Toasted Bread Garnished with Chicken, Bacon, Chopped Chicken, and Peppers

Tranches de Pain Grillees Garnies de Poulet, Petit Sale, Poulet Hache et Piments

These are slices of bread toasted on both sides, and left to get cold. They are generally buttered with mustard or anchovy butter (No. 569), and on one side over the butter lay the necessary garnishing without covering it again. They can be made with roast-beef and horseradish, or caviare, foies-gras, anchovies, sardines, hot roast beef with gravy, chicken, bacon, and lettuce, chopped chicken and green peppers, also broiled sardines.

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For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer is describing open-faced toasts — canapés at supper scale — rather than a single fixed dish. The instructions are deliberately loose, so the useful work is in the details he leaves out.

The hinge: toast, then cool completelyBread toasted on both sides and left to go cold is what keeps the base crisp under a wet garnish. Buttering warm toast softens it, and the compound butter melts into the crumb instead of sealing it.
Anchovy butter (No. 569)In the original that is anchovy fillets or essence pounded smooth with butter and passed through a sieve. Two or three oil-packed fillets mashed into 4 oz of softened butter, with a squeeze of lemon, is the working equivalent; anchovy paste from a tube does the same job.
Mustard butterSoftened butter beaten with enough Dijon or English mustard to season sharply — roughly 1 tablespoon to 4 oz butter. It is a spread, not a coating, and should go on thinly so the topping sticks.
"Petit sale"Salt pork or lightly salt-cured belly, closer to unsmoked streaky bacon or pancetta than to modern smoked bacon. Blanch it briefly if it tastes very salty, then crisp it and let it cool before it goes on the toast.
Don't cover it againThe instruction to lay the garnish on one side "without covering it again" is the point: these are open toasts, not sandwiches. The garnish should be visible and cut to sit within the bread's edges.
Bread and cuttingA close-crumbed white pan loaf, sliced about 3/8 inch, works best. Toast whole slices, cool, spread, then trim crusts and cut into fingers or triangles — trimming first wastes bread and leaves ragged edges.
The hot roast beef exceptionThe hot exceptions -- most of the list is cold, but "hot roast beef with gravy" and "broiled sardines" are cooked to order and belong on toast served straight away rather than left standing on a cold table.
YieldReckon four fingers per slice and three or four fingers a head as part of a cold table; a large loaf gives around 60 pieces.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer put these among the cold side dishes of The Epicurean (1894), the compendium of his years at Delmonico's in New York, and they sit at the point where the English savoury on toast turns into the French canapé — a word whose culinary sense is usually explained by the bread being a seat for whatever lies on it. The list of garnishes is a fair index of what a fashionable American kitchen of the 1890s kept in its larder: caviar, foie gras, tinned sardines and anchovies alongside cold roast beef, bacon and chicken, the preserved and imported items among them made reliably available by rail and steamship. Recipes written this way, as a base plus a menu of permutations, were common in professional books of the period, with cross-references such as the anchovy butter at No. 569 carrying the detail. Toasts of this kind suited suppers and late collations, where dishes had to stand on a table without collapsing — consistent with bread toasted on both sides and left to go cold first.