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Windsor Canapes

Cold chicken, ham, and tongue are blended with butter, cheese, mustard, and cayenne, then spread on toasted bread.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 12 ingredients
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Why it works: Butter and bread are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 27,232 recipes. Both carry delta-decalactone, which smells sweet, creamy. The science ↓

Windsor Canapes

Ingredients

Directions

Make the paste

  1. Pound the cold chicken, ham, and tongue together until they form a paste.

  2. Mix in the butter, grated cheese, mustard, and cayenne pepper until well combined.

Prepare and assemble the canapes

  1. Cut slices of dense bread into uniform shapes: oblong (3.5 x 1.5 inches), round (2.5 inches diameter), and oval (3 x 2.25 inches).

  2. Toast the bread lightly and spread with butter mixed with anchovy essence or plain butter.

  3. Season with salt, mustard, and red pepper, then pipe a string of anchovy butter or other spread around the edges.

  4. Garnish the center as desired.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

  1. Butter + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  2. Cheese + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,130 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-decalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Ham + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  4. Butter + cheesetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together7,962 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  5. Mustard + peppertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together15,430 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Cold chicken white meat
Provides the main body and texture of the paste once pounded.
Cooked ham
Adds savoury flavour and firmness to the meat paste.
Cooked tongue
Adds rich, savoury flavour and a smooth, spreadable texture to the paste.
Butter
Adds fat and richness, helping bind the paste into a smooth, spreadable mass.
Grated chester cheese
Adds sharp, savoury flavour and helps the paste hold together.

The step that matters

Toast the bread lightly. Toasting dries and firms the bread surface so it resists soaking up the butter and spread, keeping the canapes crisp rather than soggy.

Swap the mustard

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (chicken, meat, ham, butter, cheese, pepper, bread):

  1. Capsicumfits about as well
  2. Tomatofits about as well
  3. Potatofits about as well
  4. Mustardthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against chicken, meat, ham, butter, cheese, pepper, bread. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.

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