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Caviare Canapes
Season the caviare with a dash of lemon juice and a very little onion juice. Spread mixture on toasted rounds of white bread and sprinkle top with finely chopped hard-boiled egg. Garnish with cress.
A three-line recipe that assumes you already know the proportions, so the work is in judgment rather than technique. Everything hinges on keeping the caviare cold and unbruised.
- QuantitiesThe original gives none. Figure roughly 2 oz of caviare for a dozen 1.5-inch rounds, with about a teaspoon of lemon juice and a scant quarter-teaspoon of onion juice for that amount. Taste before you commit the whole tin.
- Onion juiceNot chopped onion. Grate a peeled onion on a fine rasp and press the pulp through a sieve, or halve one and press the cut face against a box grater. A few drops go a long way and too much flattens the caviare.
- Do not overwork itBroken eggs release oil and can turn the spread muddy, so tip the lemon and onion juice over the caviare and turn it over two or three times with a soft spatula rather than stirring. The recipe says only 'season'; the gentle handling is an inference, not an instruction in the text.
- What caviare meant in 1900What caviare meant then -- Cookbooks of this period generally assumed salted or pressed sturgeon roe, usually saltier than today's malossol tins, which may be why no extra salt appears. Modern lightly salted roe may need none either -- taste first. Lumpfish, trout or salmon roe all work, though the dyed lumpfish sort will bleed color into the egg.
- The toastCut rounds from firm white bread with a plain cutter, then toast them, or dry them in a low to moderate oven, until crisp through. The recipe calls only for toasting and gives no oven or temperature. Untoasted or soft bread goes limp under the wet topping within minutes.
- Assemble lateSpread no more than fifteen or twenty minutes before serving, and keep the caviare over ice until the moment it goes on. These do not hold.
- CressProbably garden cress or watercress; the recipe does not specify which, nor whether the sprigs go on each canape or round the edge of the platter. Watercress is the easier modern substitute.
- YieldTwo ounces of roe and half a small loaf give about twelve to sixteen canapes -- one round of appetizers for four to six people.
Caviare canapes belong to the wave of Russian-inflected service that swept American and British entertaining in the late nineteenth century, a period that also saw the shift to service a la russe, where dishes came to the table in courses rather than all at once. Sturgeon roe was not then the rarity it has become: the Delaware, the Hudson and the Great Lakes supported a substantial American sturgeon fishery, and domestic caviare was correspondingly cheap. That abundance, before the fishery collapsed from overharvesting within a generation, is why a book like this one can treat the ingredient as an unremarkable pantry item. The pairing with chopped hard-boiled egg, lemon and onion is the standard garnish set that still accompanies caviare service, generally traced to Russian practice, where the same accompaniments are handed round with blini.