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Chicken Canapes
Chop fine the white meat of a chicken and two stalks of celery. Season with salt, pepper, and vinegar. Let stand a few minutes, then drain dry; add a little mayonnaise dressing and mix well. Serve on rounds of toast that have been spread lightly with melted butter. Sprinkle chopped chives over the whole.
A straightforward chicken salad served open-faced on toast. The one step worth respecting is the brief marinade and the draining that follows it — skip the draining and the mayonnaise slackens and the toast goes soft within minutes.
- The hinge: drain hardThe salt, pepper and vinegar draw water out of both chicken and celery. Press the mixture in a sieve and blot it before the mayonnaise goes in, or the dressing will thin and weep into the bread.
- QuantitiesThe recipe gives no weights or yield. The white meat of one chicken might run 10-12 oz cooked, which with two stalks of celery would make roughly 2 cups of filling; how many canapes that covers depends entirely on how thickly they are spread.
- VinegarNo amount is given. A teaspoon or two of plain cider or white wine vinegar over the whole mixture would suit a quick seasoning rather than a pickle. The recipe says only 'a few minutes' standing.
- MayonnaiseA 'mayonnaise dressing' of this period was generally made fresh with raw yolk and would have been looser and sharper than jarred mayonnaise. Commercial mayonnaise thinned with a little lemon juice comes close. Add it sparingly -- the mixture should hold together, not glisten.
- Rounds of toastCut the rounds from firm white sandwich bread before toasting, not after, so the edges stay clean. Toast dry, then brush with melted butter while warm; the butter seals the surface against the filling.
- ChivesFresh only. Dried chives contribute nothing here. Snip them over the assembled canapés at the last moment, as they darken and go limp on contact with the dressing.
- TimingAssemble within half an hour of serving. The filling itself can be made a few hours ahead and kept covered and cold, but toast and topping should meet late.
Canapés — from the French for a sofa or couch, the bread being the seat on which the garnish rests — arrived in American entertaining in the late nineteenth century, and by the 1900s cookery writers were treating them as a standard opener for luncheons and card parties. This recipe belongs to a compact genre of the era: cold cooked chicken, celery for crunch, and a bound dressing, a formula that also produced the chicken salad and the chicken sandwich in the same books. Such recipes reflect how loosely the category was drawn at the time, when anything served on bread, closed or open, could be filed under sandwiches.