Home › Dinner › Lobster Savory Canapes
Lobster Savory Canapes
6 diamond-shaped pieces white bread 1/2 cup minced lobster 1 teaspoon minced green pepper 1 teaspoon minced, stuffed olives Mazola Mayonnaise Whole stuffed olives Capers Fry the bread in deep Mazola hot enough to brown it in forty counts, drain on crumpled paper and spread with a paste made of the minced lobster, olives, green peppers and mayonnaise. Decorate around the edges with the capers and put a whole stuffed olive in the center of each.
A fried-bread canapé from a corn oil promotional book, where every recipe routes through Mazola. It comes together in minutes once the bread is fried and cooled.
- "Forty counts" means about 375F"Forty counts" means a moderately hot fat -- The old test was to drop in a bread cube and count while it browned; a cube browning in about forty seconds was reckoned in period tables at somewhere around 375-385F, though a "count" is not a precise second. Use a thermometer and fry the diamonds until pale gold on both sides, well under a minute total.
- Mazola is corn oilThe brand still exists and the product is unchanged in kind: a neutral, high-smoke-point refined corn oil. Any neutral frying oil works identically here.
- Cool the croutons before spreadingThe hinge of the dish. Warm fried bread will thin the mayonnaise into a slick and soften the crisp surface within minutes. Drain, cool to room temperature, then top no more than an hour before serving.
- Cut the bread thinThe recipe specifies only diamond-shaped pieces of white bread. Thin slices, on the order of a quarter inch, suit a fried canape base; standard sandwich slices are close enough. Trim the crusts and cut diamonds small enough to be one bite plus one.
- Lobster quantityHalf a cup of minced meat is roughly 3 oz, about what comes off one small tail or a pair of claws. Cooked, chilled lobster is intended; picked meat from the fish counter is fine.
- Mayonnaise, added by feelNo amount is given because it is a binder. Start with a tablespoon and add until the paste holds a shape on the knife without weeping. Commercial mayonnaise avoids the raw-yolk question entirely in a dish that is never cooked after mixing.
- "Stuffed olives" means pimiento-stuffedGreen olives stuffed with sweet red pepper, then as now the standard cocktail olive. Pat both the minced olives and the capers dry so they do not water down the paste.
- YieldSix canapés, enough for two or three people as a first bite. The proportions scale straight up; figure a cup of lobster for a dozen.
Mazola was introduced by Corn Products Refining Company in the early twentieth century, and books like this one were written to persuade cooks that corn oil could do everything butter and lard did, including deep frying and mayonnaise. That explains why a lobster canapé—in the ingredients and again in the method—names the brand twice. The dish itself belongs to the long American vogue for the canapé, a fried or toasted bread base under a savory spread, which is generally traced to French service and is often said to have been a fixture of dinner-party first courses from roughly the 1890s through the 1930s. Capers and pimiento-stuffed olives were the standard decorative vocabulary of the era, chosen as much for the contrast of green, red and pale pink against a gold crouton as for taste.