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Canape, Victoria
Plunge two medium-sized live lobsters into two gallons boiling water for twenty minutes; lift them up and let cool off. Crack all the shells, without injuring the meat, carefully remove, and cut the meat into thin slices. Cut from a loaf of sandwich bread six slices half an inch thick and two and a half inches in diameter; toast them to a nice golden colour, lightly butter the surface, then evenly divide the lobster on top of each toast. Mix a teaspoon of salt with two saltspoons paprika and sprinkle it over the lobster. Heat two tablespoons melted butter in a saucepan, adding one tablespoon flour; stir well with a wooden spoon, add one and a half gills hot milk and one and a half gills hot tomato sauce. Season with two saltspoons salt and a saltspoon cayenne pepper; mix well and let cook for ten minutes, occasionally mixing. Then divide the preparation evenly on top of each lobster canape and arrange a very thin slice of truffle in the centre of each. Neatly decorate all around with six sliced canned mushrooms, then sprinkle two tablespoons grated Parmesan cheese over all; place in a baking tin and set in the oven to bake for eight minutes, or until a nice golden colour. Remove, dress on a hot dish with a folded napkin, decorate with parsley and serve.
A hot lobster canapé built in the grand-hotel manner: toast round, sliced lobster, a thick cream-and-tomato sauce, cheese, and a quick pass through the oven to glaze. Most of the work is in the sauce, and its consistency is what makes or breaks the dish.
- The hinge: sauce thicknessTwo tablespoons butter and one of flour against 1 1/2 cups of liquid gives a thin sauce that will run off the toast and soak it. Cook it the full ten minutes to reduce, and let it cool slightly so it mounds; if it still pours, reduce further or add a little more roux.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so one and a half gills is 3/4 cup each of hot milk and tomato sauce. A saltspoon is a scant 1/4 teaspoon.
- Lobster timingTwenty minutes in boiling water will overcook a medium lobster into cotton. A 1 to 1 1/2 lb lobster needs about 8-10 minutes at a full boil, and here it gets a second cooking in the oven besides.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given, as was usual in books of this date. Eight minutes to a golden top implies a hot oven, in modern terms roughly 425-450F, or a spell under the broiler for the last minute or two.
- SaltA full teaspoon of salt sprinkled over the meat of two lobsters, plus more in the sauce and Parmesan on top, is heavy by current taste. Season the lobster lightly and correct the sauce at the end.
- Tomato sauceHere this means a cooked and sieved tomato sauce of the period, not a garlicky pasta sauce; period versions range from a simple seasoned purée to a compound sauce built on stock and mirepoix. Passata reduced by a third is the closest thing on a supermarket shelf.
- Truffle and canned mushroomsThe truffle slice is decoration and can be omitted without harming the dish; a drop of truffle oil is not a substitute at this heat. Canned mushroom caps turn up often in recipes of this period, but sautéed fresh ones taste better and behave the same.
- Bread roundsHalf-inch slices cut to 2 1/2 inches across, which is a plain round cutter or a glass. A close-crumbed white sandwich loaf holds the sauce; airy modern bread collapses.
- YieldSix canapés, meant as a first course for six at a long dinner. As a light lunch or supper dish, count two per person and expect leftover lobster from two whole ones.
Canapés like this one belong to the grand restaurant and hotel cookery of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when a hot savoury on toast might be served as part of a formal dinner, though its place in the sequence varied. Compound names of this kind — Victoria, Lorenzo, Rothschild — worked as shorthand on a professional kitchen's menu rather than as descriptions: a cook was expected to know which garnish went with which name, and truffle and lobster in a tomato-tinted cream sauce is the sort of combination such labels signalled. The name Victoria is generally traced to garnishes honouring Queen Victoria, though the attributions in period cookbooks are inconsistent and often contradict one another. The reliance on canned mushrooms and prepared tomato sauce alongside live lobster and truffle is characteristic of the American professional kitchen of the 1900s, where luxury ingredients and factory-packed ones sat side by side without embarrassment.