Stuffed Eggs

This was Pamela’s contribution to the Canape Party – over to her:

Stuffed eggs, from Diets For Health, by Marguerite Patten, 1964

“Hard boiled eggs can be stuffed in a variety of ways . . . Take out the yolks, mash and mayonnaise,  or margarine and seasoning, then add one of the following:

1 Grated or cream cheese

2 Curry powder and chutney

3 Chopped nuts and parsley

To give additional food value, a spoonful of rolled oats which have been soaked in milk can be mixed with any of the above filling. Pile or pipe into the egg white cases and sprinkle cayenne on top.”

This dish is from a book by Marguerite Patten that provides recipes for people on special diets: slimmers, invalids, diabetics, etc. This is from the chapter for vegetarians. I am a vegetarian. Marguerite is very concerned about my protein intake.
I decided to make two kinds of stuffed egg: cheesy ones (using grated mature cheddar), and curry ones (using madras curry powder and mango chutney). I was bit alarmed by the addition of chutney in the curried eggs. Not as much as I was by the idea of stirring in oats soaked in milk (cold porridge?) for “additional food value”.
This is a very easy recipe to put together, although it can get messy with fat fingers such as mine, and I ended up with extra stuffing. Perhaps the surplus could be spread on crackers to make another canape? Waste not, want not. That’s what Marguerite Patten is all about, isn’t it?
This might have looked neater if I had piped the stuffing into the eggs. However, I didn’t have a piping bag so I used a plastic bag with a hole cut in it. Somehow I managed to make two holes in one bag and that led to a whole heap of mess. Also, of course, the chunks of mango in the chutney caused bottlenecks. With explosive consequences.
The presentation was much improved by a few tactical sprigs of parsley to hide the worst messes and brighten up the essentially mucky-yellow colour of the dish.
Still, it tasted quite nice, and you couldn’t really notice the oaty bits at all. I hope all that “additional food value” did us good.
Half a boiled egg, stuffed, is quite a hefty canape. So if your guests have hearty appetites, and you love the smell of boiled eggs, dig in.

(And now back to me for the photos)

Here’s what the picture in the book looks like:

and here’s what the eggs at the party looked like:

I thought these were delicious – the filling was lovely. Much more appetising than the photo in the book!

Cheese and Tomato Savouries

These were my contribution to our Canape party’s ‘Guess The Cheesy Decade’ competition, where 3 canapes were made, from various decades and guests were asked to, well, guess the decade. I can’t remember what the consensus was on when this recipe was from, but I don’t think anyone got it right. The recipe is from Modern Cookery Illustrated by Lydia Chatterton (Odham’s Press Ltd), and my edition is a 1947 reprint.

Notes

• I made 3 times this amount, yielding 12 savouries.
• Not being sure what patty tins are, never mind actually having any in my kitchen, I used fairycake papers instead.

Rather unfortunately I appear to not have a photo of these. However, if you can imagine irregularly formed splodges of cheese and tomato on rounds of toast you’re pretty much there. They tasted a little like vomit – the parmesan didn’t work well here, and the overall effect was not great. I wouldn’t make these again.

To make up for the lack of photos of these savouries, here’s some scans from the source book:

Eggs a la Dauphine

This was my most elaborate dish for the canape party, and the most challenging to construct. It’s from Francatelli’s Cook’s Guide of 1864, and is another egg dish. Although not strictly a canape the description appeared to be of a dish that could be easily divvied up into individual servings (note the ‘appeared‘!)

As you can see this is a long long recipe, and I challenge anyone to read through it once and be able to tell me exactly how many eggs I need to boil, in total,  in order to have enough*

Cooking/ recipe notes

• It all went well until it came to raising the eggs up into a pyramidal form. Twelve half-eggs do not go easily into a pyramid and I spent a fair while trying different, equally rubbish looking combinations. What I went for eventually was a kind of cross of eggs for the base, with another layer on top.
• I have no idea whether the ’single egg’ that crowns the pyramid was meant to be one of the halved eggs, or another whole egg. I only had halves at this point, so wedged 2 together with the stuffing and balanced it on top of the pyramid.
• Once I’d got the pyramid reasonably pyramiddish and stable I tried rubbing the yolks through the sieve. This went badly, and instead of the ‘vermicelli’ demanded by Francatelli I covered my wonky egg pyramid with a fine yellow yolky kind of fluff, quite unlike any foodstuff I’ve ever seen before.
• I then placed this in the oven, at a moderate temperature, and drank a few cocktails (well, maybe half a cocktail), before returning to the oven to remove what was now a baking tray with a flat mess of halved eggs in a yellowish mixture, with croutons around it. The pyramid had completely collapsed, in other words.
• I didn’t bother with the bechamel.

The result

And the taste?

The eggs were ok. They weren’t very exciting, and a bit yolky tasting. The stuffing was quite bland. And instead of easy portions for the guests it was all a bit messy. Not worth the effort, sorry Francatelli.

* I decided it was 13 eggs.

Oeufed by Alix

Party Pyramids

Another of my contributions to the canape party – this comes from our old friend Make a Meal of Cheese. Is it just me or do the prawns in the picture below look kind of weird? Like…too pink?

Really very straighforward stuff – mostly involves chopping things up, and also finding something in one’s kitchen that will cut a slice of bread into a 4″ circle.  That was harder than I thought! Once assembled they looked like this:

Photo courtesy of Sarah

(I suspect this photo is actually from the day after, as it’s daylight outside. It appears to be the only evidence we have of their brief existence so it’ll have to do).

Tasting notes

I didn’t actually eat any of these, because 1) I was already drunk when I made them, and 2) they were kind of huge and pointless. You wouldn’t have a whole one to yourself, but to pick at it and eat, say just the top 2 layers was a bit odd, and bits keep falling off anyway. So nobody really ate them, and they sat there looking majestic and sad and drying up as everything else around them got eaten. They seem kind of for show anyway; more a display of colour than something intended to be delicious. You can hardly look a them and wonder what it’s going to taste like – it’s just familiar ingredients piled up with some bread. No seasoning, no sauces, nada.  If any of our readers were at the party and tried these can they please come forward in the comments box please? You can remain anonymous if you like.

Partied by Alix

Salmon Croûtes

This recipe and sieved eggs were made by Rob for our Canapé Party. Rob sez:

“This recipe was taken from Practical Cookery For All, published in 1953 by Odhams Press Ltd. It’s an all-round cookery bible with chapters introducing new cooks to a range of ingredients and techniques, modern kitchenware and the new science of ‘nutrition’. There’s loads of emphasis on presentation. Full-page colour photos depict dishes like meat ragout or mock roast served on giant silver platters, decorated with vegetable crowns, surrounded by oceans of peas and finished with delicate sculptures of piped mashed potato. The recipe chapters dive straight in with a selection of rich hors d’œuvre for the Serious Business of impressing party guests.

I picked the following recipe as, unlike most of the others, it only involves one hard-boiled egg. LET’S GO!”

*****

SALMON CROÛTES

1/4 lb. kippered or smoked salmon
A few capers
1 oz. butter
Pepper
Cayenne
1 croûton of bread for each person
Sprig of parsley
1 egg

Time: 10 minutes to boil the egg, 3 minutes to heat the salmon

METHOD: See that the fish is free from skin and bone, chop it finely, and mix it with the capers, also finely chopped. Melt the butter in a saucepan, add a sprinking of pepper and, if liked, a dash of cayenne. Add the fish and mix well. Pile a little heap on each croûton and decorate when cold.

Boil the egg hard and leave until cold. Chop the white finely and rub the yolk through a sieve. Place some of the white round each piece of fish, and sprinkle the sieved yolk and a little finely chopped parsley on top. This gives a very pleasing effect.

******

mmmm, pleasing indeed!

NOTES

This recipe was written for larger servings than mere finger food but the above quantities easily yielded 12 canape-size servings.

For the croûtons, I used a baguette cut into medium slices. These were tossed in olive oil and baked in a medium oven for about 15 minutes.

While the sieved egg yolk was a nice touch, chucking bits of egg white all over my nice fish just seemed *wrong* so I left it out and gobbled it for the valuable protein.

COMMENTS

These were luxurious and decadent like you might expect from a pile of smoked salmon and butter. The richness was balanced out nicely by the piquancy of the capers and the heat of the cayenne, although bit more of both wouldn’t have gone amiss. I don’t think the egg added much beyond some additional colour – a task that was already borne well enough by the parsley. They also held together remarkably well during a five-mile bus trip. Overall, a very pleasing appetiser that could do without all the boiled egg fannydangle.

Beef Cornets

These were made for the canape party, and boy did they go down like a, well, lead balloon. The recipe is from Good Housekeeping’s  Cookery Book (1955), and the recipe is brief and offers no clues as to quantities of ingredients. Thanks for that.

I could only afford those cheap squares of beef that you get in packets, so had to improvise a little – I origamied the beef squares into a sort of triangle and rolled them neatly (yeah right) into a cone, before securing them with a cocktail stick.  The delicious filling was approximately 50% whipped cream and 50% horseradish. I used horseradish sauce, being unable to find actual horseradish.

The Cornets

Photo courtesy of Marianna

Tasting notes

Although I ate two of these I enjoyed neither, and most of them were still uneaten come the day after the party (and were binned). There was something entirely disconcerting about the whipped cream/ beef combo, and I had, perhaps overdone the horseradish a little. It did say to flavour it strongly, and I wanted to mask the taste of the cream…

The Hostess Book of Entertaining on ‘Putting It Right’ (part 1)

In which home economics legend Marguerite Patten lists rectifications for the last-minute culinary disasters which can befall a cook who has over-refreshed themselves or spent too long in front of the mirror or with their guests. Or, as she reassures us:

From time to time even the most accomplished and experienced cook has a failure in the kitchen. What appears at first glance to be a spoiled dish amy well be disguised, or the fault remedied, with a little ‘know-how’. I hope the following hints will be helpful.

H’ors d’oeuvre

A fish cocktail sauce tastes dull
Add a few drops of Tabasco, soy or Worcestershire sauce, plus a little cream.

A pate has been over-cooked and is dry and crumbly
Put the pate into a bowl, stir in cream plus a little sherry or brandy until of the desired consistency. Add extra seasoning plus chopped herbs to taste.

Soup

The soup is over-salt
Add a little milk or cream and taste again. If this has not remedied the fault, peel and dice one or two potatoes, simmer in the soup for 10 – 15 minutes, the lift out the potatoes, add more cream or milk. By this time the soup could have become too thin in consistency so a little extra thickening may be necessary.

The soup lacks flavour and time is short
Add a little garlic and/or celery salt to a creamy soup; a pinch of curry powder and a little Worcestershire sauce to a meat-based soup; tomato puree is another excellent ingredient to add to meat or vegetable soups.

The soup looks dull
Add an interesting garnish such as yoghurt and diced fresh or canned red pepper to a dark-coloured soup; browned blanched almonds are an ideal topping for creamy soups. Try tiny balls of cream cheese on a bortsch.

Turkey Tarragon Soup

The Hostess Book of Entertaining by Marguerite Patten. (Charles and David, 1980.)