Home › Fish › Caviare Sandwich No. 2
Caviare Sandwich No. 2
To a can of caviare add the juice of half a lemon, and one teaspoonful of olive oil. Mix well together until a paste is formed. Spread mixture on thin slices of lightly buttered white bread or toast and cover with another slice of bread.
A three-ingredient spread whose success depends almost entirely on restraint: the lemon and oil are there to loosen the roe, not to flavour it.
- What size canTinned caviare was sold in a range of small sizes; 2 oz is a reasonable working assumption, which with half a lemon and a teaspoon of oil makes enough for three or four small sandwiches. Scale the lemon down if you use a larger tin, or the paste will be sour and slack.
- The roe you will buy is not the roe they boughtAround the turn of the century "a can of caviare" generally meant pressed or salted sturgeon roe, cheap and heavily salted. Today the affordable equivalents are lumpfish, paddlefish or trout roe; the fine sturgeon caviars sold now are lightly salted and far too delicate to be mashed into a paste. Use a modest grade for this, and rinse and drain dyed lumpfish roe or it will stain the butter black.
- Mix, do not mash"Until a paste is formed" reads harsher than it needs to. Fold with a fork just until the eggs are coated and cohesive; grinding them to a smooth paste releases a metallic, fishy liquor.
- SaltAdd none, and use unsalted butter if you have it. Salted roe plus salted butter plus salted bread is the usual way this sandwich goes wrong.
- The breadThin means thin: a day-old close-crumbed white loaf cut about 1/4 inch, buttered right to the edges so the moisture does not soak through. Trim the crusts and cut into fingers or triangles if you are serving these with tea or drinks.
- TimingAssemble within an hour of serving and keep covered and cold. Roe weeps, and a caviare sandwich made in the morning for the evening will be a grey, damp thing.
- Worth addingGrated onion or a layer of sieved hard-boiled egg are in keeping with the period, and both help absorb moisture.
Caviare appears in an early twentieth-century American sandwich book, and the reason is the sturgeon of the Delaware, Hudson and Columbia rivers, which were fished so heavily in the late nineteenth century that their roe was salted, tinned and sold cheaply. By the time this book was compiled that fishery was collapsing, and caviare was on its way to becoming the imported delicacy it is now.