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Nut and Olive Canapes
Fry rounds of white bread in butter; mix equal quantities of chopped English walnuts and olives with enough mayonnaise dressing to moisten. Spread on bread and garnish with chopped pimentos.
A three-ingredient spread on fried bread rounds; the only real variables are how dry you get the olives and how evenly you fry the bases.
- Bread roundsCut 1½–2 inch rounds from firm white sandwich bread, ideally a day old so it absorbs less butter. A biscuit cutter or a small glass works; save the trimmings for crumbs.
- Frying, not toastingUse clarified butter or a mix of butter and neutral oil over medium heat, about a minute a side until evenly gold. Whole butter alone will brown and speck before the bread crisps. Drain on paper and cool completely, or the mayonnaise will slacken and soak in.
- "English walnuts"That is the ordinary walnut sold today, as distinguished in older American books from the native black walnut, which is far more assertive and would overwhelm the olives. Toast the walnuts briefly and chop them fine.
- OlivesMost likely green olives in brine. Pit, chop, then blot thoroughly on a towel — wet olives make a spread that slides off the bread.
- Equal quantitiesBy volume after chopping. Half a cup each of walnuts and olives, moistened with roughly 2–3 tablespoons of mayonnaise, covers about 20 rounds. Add the mayonnaise a spoonful at a time; the mixture should hold its shape, not spread like a paste.
- PimentosJarred whole pimentos, drained and patted dry, or roasted red pepper. Chop small — this is colour on top of a brown-and-green spread, and nothing more.
- SaltThe olives bring plenty, so taste before adding any. Some brine-cured olives will make the mixture salty enough that the mayonnaise needs a squeeze of lemon to balance it.
- TimingAssemble within an hour of serving. The spread itself keeps a day refrigerated, but fried bread goes leathery once dressed.
Canapés — the name often traced to the French for a couch or canopy, the bread being the seat for whatever sits on it — arrived in American entertaining books in force around the turn of the twentieth century, when the formal dinner gave way in part to the reception, the card party and the buffet, all of which needed food that could be eaten standing up. Nut-and-olive mixtures bound with mayonnaise are everywhere in that literature, and it is tempting to connect their prevalence to the growing commercial availability of bottled and canned olives, jarred pimentos, and shelled walnuts, along with mayonnaise as the era's default binder for anything chopped. The pimento in particular seems to have been something of a novelty ingredient of the period, generally said to have been imported from Spain and later grown in the American South, and cookbooks of the day scatter it over nearly everything that needs a spot of red.