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Bacon Canapes
Cut bread in squares one-fourth inch thick, saute the bacon fat. Spread with a little French mustard, cover with fried bacon finely chopped, and sprinkle with finely chopped pimolas.
A three-line canapé that assumes you already have bacon fat in the pan. The printed text drops a word — the bread is what gets sautéed in the bacon fat.
- The missing word"Cut bread in squares one-fourth inch thick, saute the bacon fat" should read sauté in the bacon fat. Fry the bread squares in the rendered fat until crisp on both sides, then drain on paper before topping.
- PimolasA trade name of the period for green olives stuffed with pimiento. Any pimiento-stuffed Spanish olive works; chop fine so the pieces cling to the mustard.
- French mustardNot the bright yellow American prepared kind. Use a smooth, mild French-style mustard such as Dijon, spread thinly — it is the glue holding the bacon on.
- BreadA firm white sandwich loaf, day-old, cuts cleanly at a quarter inch. The recipe does not give a size; squares of about 1½ inches, crusts trimmed, suit a canapé eaten in two bites.
- Order of workFry the bacon first, lift it out to chop, then fry the bread in the fat that remains. If the pan runs dry, add more bacon fat rather than butter, which will brown and go bitter at that heat.
- Yield and timingFour slices of bread and three or four rashers give roughly sixteen canapés. Assemble no more than half an hour ahead — the mustard and olive moisture soften the fried base quickly.
This comes from the era when the canapé was arriving in American households as the fashionable opening to a meal, and small books of sandwich formulas were being published. The premise is thrift as much as elegance: bacon is fried, the fat is not discarded but used to crisp the bread, and the bacon itself is chopped so a few rashers stretch across a whole platter. The word canapé is generally traced to the French for couch or sofa, the idea being a piece of bread on which the garnish reclines — and here the couch is fried rather than toasted. Pimiento-stuffed olives were then a relatively new convenience, and they turn up constantly in books of this period wherever a recipe wants a spot of red....</p>