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Canape, Lorenzo
Cut out from a loaf of sandwich bread six slices half inch thick, trim them to circular shape, three inches in diameter. Toast them to a nice light colour. Prepare a crab forcemeat, then equally divide and arrange it on top of the canapes in dome form. Knead well together in a bowl two ounces grated Parmesan cheese with one and a half ounces of butter. Season with a saltspoon cayenne pepper and a saltspoon grated nutmeg, then mask the crab meat all around with this. Place the canapes on a tin and bake in the oven for ten minutes, or until a nice golden colour. Remove and serve.
A hot canapé from the Delmonico's repertoire, straightforward once you supply the two things Filippini assumes you already know: what a crab forcemeat is and how hot the oven should be.
- The crab forcemeatThe book expects you to know this preparation; it is not given here. In practice it means picked crab meat bound with a thick, well-reduced béchamel or a little egg and cream, seasoned and stiff enough to mound. It must hold a dome shape without slumping, so err on the thick side and chill it before shaping.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. A quarter teaspoon of cayenne across six canapés is genuinely hot; the same quantity of nutmeg is assertive but correct for the period.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, and the book does not use them anywhere. Ten minutes to a golden colour on already-toasted bread implies a hot oven; something in the region of 425F, with the rack set high, is a reasonable modern guess rather than anything the text specifies. The aim is to brown the cheese crust before the crab dries out.
- The cheese pasteTwo ounces Parmesan to one and a half ounces butter kneaded cold gives a stiff paste, not a sauce. Have the butter soft but not melted and work it with a fork or the back of a spoon; if it warms too far it will slide off the dome in the oven rather than setting into a shell.
- The bread"Sandwich bread" here means a close-grained white pan loaf. Cut the half-inch rounds from day-old bread — fresh bread tears under a cutter and goes soggy under the forcemeat.
- Toast lightly, not brownThe rounds go back into a hot oven for ten minutes, so stopping the first toasting at pale gold keeps the base from turning to charcoal underneath.
- YieldSix canapés, one apiece as a first course or two each as a savoury. They are rich; serve them straight from the oven, as reheating turns the cheese crust greasy.
Alexander Filippini spent decades in the kitchens of Delmonico's in New York, and The International Cook Book (1906) is essentially that restaurant's idiom set down for a domestic audience — hundreds of dishes carrying proper names, many of which are said to honour patrons, colleagues or the house itself. "Lorenzo" is generally taken as a nod to Lorenzo Delmonico, the nephew who ran the business through the middle of the nineteenth century, famous for his market buying and menu-making, and who did more than anyone to make the restaurant a fixture of American dining; a Lorenzo dressing and a Lorenzo garnish are also recorded. The canapé itself belongs to a category that has largely disappeared: the hot savoury, a small, sharply seasoned, cheese-crusted bite served either to open a long menu or, in the English fashion, to close it. Crab, Parmesan, cayenne and nutmeg together are a thoroughly Victorian combination, the nutmeg a survival from a much older tradition of spicing shellfish that reaches back well before the restaurant era.