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March 15
Menu: Sardine Canapes; Baked Beans; Baked Potatoes; Apple and Celery Salad; Cheese Wafers; Date Cream Pie; Coffee Sardine Canapes-Take 6 or 8 sardines, mash up with yolk of a hard-cooked egg, pepper and salt to taste, a little lemon juice and 1 teaspoon melted Crisco. Have some rounds of bread fried a pretty golden brown color in hot Crisco, spread the mixture on the croutes; garnish round the edges with some finely chopped parsley and white of 1 egg rubbed through sieve.
A straightforward canapé spread that needs almost no translation, though the fat and a couple of the terms date it. The whole thing takes about fifteen minutes once the egg is cooked.
- CriscoCrisco is hydrogenated vegetable shortening, and this book exists to sell it. Butter or a neutral oil works in the spread and for frying the bread; the melted teaspoon is there to bind the paste, so any soft fat will do.
- Croutes"Croûtes" here are simply the fried bread rounds, cut with a small cutter or a glass, roughly 1½ to 2 inches across. Fry them in shallow fat over moderate heat until golden on both sides and drain on paper before spreading, or they will go greasy under the topping.
- SardinesUse oil-packed sardines, drained and, if you like a smoother paste, boned and skinned. Six to eight fish from a standard tin will cover about a dozen small rounds.
- SeasoningSardines and their oil are already salty, so taste before adding salt at all. The lemon juice matters more than the recipe suggests: a full teaspoon or two lifts what is otherwise a heavy, oily mixture.
- The egg, splitOnly the yolk goes into the paste. The white is pushed through a sieve and scattered on top with the parsley. (The sieved-egg garnish is often called mimosa, though that name properly belongs to the yellow sieved yolk.) Sieve the white while it is cold and dry, not warm, or it clumps.
- Assemble lateFried bread softens quickly under a wet spread. Fry the rounds ahead if you must, but top them within twenty minutes of serving.
- YieldAbout 12 small canapés, enough for four to six people as a first bite with drinks.
This appears in The Story of Crisco, the 1913 promotional cookbook Procter & Gamble published to teach American cooks what to do with a fat that had no precedent in their kitchens: a solid, shelf-stable, flavorless vegetable shortening that could stand in for both butter and lard. The book's "Calendar of Dinners" supplied a year of menus in which Crisco recurs across the courses, frying bread here and binding a fish paste in the same breath. The canapé itself belongs to an older tradition of savory tinned-fish spreads on fried or toasted bread, which is generally said to have spread in Anglo-American entertaining as cheap tinned sardines from France and Portugal became widely available to ordinary grocers over the course of the nineteenth century. The sieved egg white and chopped parsley border is standard garde-manger practice of the period.