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Canapes, Madison
Plunge thirty-six freshly opened little neck clams in a quart boiling water and boil three minutes. Drain well on a sieve, then finely chop them. Place in a saucepan with one and a half gills milk, one gill cream half a bean crushed garlic, half teaspoon chopped parsley, half teaspoon chopped chives, saltspoon cayenne pepper and one saltspoon grated nutmeg. Mix well and boil fifteen minutes, lightly mixing meanwhile. Add four tablespoons bread crumbs and two egg yolks. Sharply mix with wooden spoon while heating five minutes. Remove, place in a deep dish and let cool off. Cut from a stale loaf of sandwich bread six quarter-inch slices, pare off the crusts, lightly butter and toast a nice golden. Broil six thin slices ham one minute on each side. Place a piece of ham on top of each toast; pare the ham to even size of the toast. Then evenly spread the preparation over them; nicely smooth the surface. Mix on a plate an ounce of butter with one tablespoon grated Parmesan cheese and evenly spread over the six canapes, place on a tin, set in oven to bake ten minutes. Remove, dress on a dish with a folded napkin, decorate with six quarters of lemon and serve.
A hot clam canapé of the Delmonico school: a thick clam panade bound with egg yolk, spread over ham on toast and gratinéed. The measurements are pre-metric American and the boiling times reflect an era less worried about tough shellfish.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so one and a half gills of milk is 3/4 cup and one gill of cream is 1/2 cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, which is the right order of magnitude for both the cayenne and the nutmeg.
- "Half a bean" of garlic"bean" in this book is generally taken to mean a clove, though it may equally mean a bean-sized piece. Either way the quantity is tiny: the garlic is a background note, not the flavor.
- The clams are cooked twiceThree minutes in boiling water sets them; the subsequent fifteen minutes of boiling in the milk and cream is what makes the mixture thick, but it also makes the clam meat firm. Chop the clams finely, as instructed, so the texture reads as a paste rather than as rubbery pieces, and stir often — a dairy mixture with this little starch in it scorches readily.
- Quantity of clamsThirty-six littlenecks is a lot of shucking for six canapés. Note that the recipe itself adds no salt; the seasoning is cayenne and nutmeg only.
- Binding with yolksOnce the yolks and crumbs go in, keep the pan below a simmer for the five minutes of "sharp mixing." Boiling after the yolks are added will curdle the mixture into grains.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A hot oven of 400-425F for ten minutes will melt the Parmesan butter and brown the tops; the filling is already cooked, so the bake is only for color.
- The hamThin sliced boiled or baked ham, not country ham, which is far too salty against the cayenne and Parmesan. One minute a side under the broiler is only to firm and warm it.
- YieldSix canapés or twelve pieces if the toasts are halved on the diagonal before serving. The recipe calls the lemon quarters decoration, though they can of course be squeezed over the rich filling.
The International Cook Book belongs to Alexander Filippini, long a chef at Delmonico's in New York, and it carries the habits of the great hotel kitchens: hundreds of near-identical preparations distinguished only by a garnish and a proper name. "Madison" is one of dozens of such labels in the book, and it is generally not possible to trace any single dish to a specific namesake. What the recipe does document is the American hot canapé at its most elaborate: a clam mixture that is essentially a stiff cream sauce, layered on ham and toast and finished with cheese butter under heat, a construction that shares its logic with Welsh rarebit and with the clam and oyster "toasts" that filled the first course of Gilded Age menus. Littlenecks were the everyday shellfish of that kitchen; the labor of opening three dozen for six pieces of toast tells you how many hands a hotel brigade had.