No. 991

Florentine Toasts

Roties Florentine

Roll out a layer of fancy roll paste (No. 3418) form raised edges around it, having it three inches wide, by twelve inches long; besprinkle with oil, and garnish with anchovy or sardine fillets; season with chives, garlic, and chopped onions, and lay on top slices of peeled and pressed tomatoes, also thin slices of American cheese. Cook them in a hot oven, and when done strew over chopped parsley and savory, cut them into pieces an inch and a half wide, having eight of them in all, or if preferred they may be made of slices of toasted bread three inches long, by one and a half wide, instead of paste.

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For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer's rôties are savory toasts meant to come out of the oven and go straight to the table. The version on paste is essentially a tomato-and-cheese tart cut into fingers; the bread version is faster and closer to what most cooks will want.

Serve it hot and cut it lateThe whole point of a rôtie is the contrast between crisp base and molten topping, and both are gone within a few minutes. Bake, strew the herbs, cut into the eight fingers, and send it out immediately.
"Fancy roll paste"The recipe sends you to No. 3418 elsewhere in the same book, which is not reproduced here. All-butter puff pastry, rolled to about 3 mm and given a folded border to make the raised edge, will give the raised-edge strip the recipe describes.
A hot ovenThe recipe gives no temperature. As a modern equivalent, somewhere around 425–450F: the base needs to set and brown before the tomatoes weep into it, and a moderate oven gives you a pale, soggy strip.
American cheeseIn 1894 this meant domestic factory cheddar, firm and sharp, not the processed slices sold under the name now. Use a good aged cheddar, sliced thin.
Peeled and pressed tomatoesPeel, halve, scoop out seeds and juice, then press between towels or salt briefly and drain. Untreated tomato slices release enough liquid to ruin the pastry.
SaltAnchovies or sardines, cheese and salted tomatoes together carry plenty of salt. Season the oil and aromatics lightly and taste before adding any more.
Chives, garlic and onionThe recipe leaves quantities open. For a 3 by 12 inch strip, a clove of garlic and a tablespoon each of chopped onion and chives is in scale; raw onion in that thin a layer cooks through in the time the pastry takes.
YieldEight fingers, intended as a hot side dish or savory course rather than a main. Figure two per person alongside other dishes.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) was Charles Ranhofer's summing-up of some thirty years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and its "Hot Side Dishes" chapter is full of these small baked or toasted rôties. The name is puzzling at first: in French kitchen usage à la florentine almost always signals spinach, and there is none here. What Ranhofer seems to mean is Italian in the looser sense, since oil, garlic, anchovy, tomato and cheese on a thin baked base is recognizably a pizza in all but name, written down in an American cookbook a decade before the business generally cited as the city's first licensed pizzeria, Lombardi's on Spring Street in 1905 — an attribution that is itself contested. He also offers a bread version in place of the paste.