Crab Canapes
Put the contents of a can of crab meat into a saucepan, add one tablespoonful of sherry and let simmer until the liquid disappears. Fry one small finely minced onion in a tablespoonful of butter until brown, add a cupful of milk that has blended with a tablespoonful of flour, let it come to a boil, then add the crab meat and let simmer for ten minutes; remove from the fire and when cool spread on rounds of toast and sprinkle with grated Parmesan cheese; place in a hot oven until a golden brown. Serve hot.
A hot canapé built on a thin béchamel, of the sort that turned up at card parties and receptions before the First World War. Nothing in it is difficult, but the sauce as written is looser than most cooks would want on a round of toast.
- Thicken the sauce furtherOne tablespoon of flour to a cup of milk gives a pouring sauce, not a spreading one. Either simmer it down hard before the crab goes in, or use two tablespoons of flour cooked in the butter with the onion, so the mixture holds its shape on the toast.
- The can of crabUse 6 to 8 oz of lump or claw meat, or the same weight of pasteurised refrigerated crab. Pick it over for shell and cartilage before it goes near the pan.
- Ten minutes is longCrab is already cooked, and ten minutes of simmering shreds it into threads. Fold it into the finished sauce and give it two or three minutes over low heat, just to heat through and marry the flavours.
- "A hot oven"425 to 450F. The canapés are only being browned and glazed, so five to eight minutes near the top of the oven is enough; a broiler at close range works as well.
- Fry the onion gently"Until brown" in a tablespoon of butter means golden and soft, not scorched. Burnt onion is unmistakable against sweet crab. Mince it very fine so it disappears into the sauce.
- Cool before spreadingThe instruction to let the mixture cool is not fussiness. Warm sauce soaks straight into toast; a cooled, set mixture sits on top and browns cleanly.
- SeasoningThe original gives none. The sauce needs salt, a little white pepper, and a scrape of nutmeg or a few drops of lemon; Parmesan alone will not carry it.
- YieldEnough for roughly 20 to 24 canapés cut with a small round cutter from thin-sliced bread, toasted on both sides. Serve them straight from the oven -- they slump as they stand.
Canapés often occupy their own chapter in the sandwich books of the early 1900s, treated as the hot, forked, sit-down cousin of the tea sandwich: a round of toast as a base, something rich spread over it, and a browning in the oven to finish. Crab meat had been commercially canned in the United States since the late nineteenth century, and a housekeeper in an inland city could put crab on the table without ever seeing a live one -- the recipe opens by telling her to empty the tin, with no thought that she might do otherwise. The sherry, the butter-and-flour sauce and the Parmesan gratin echo the French service that American hostesses of the period were encouraged to imitate, scaled down to something a household cook could manage.