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Caviar Canapés

Caviar canapés are toasted bread rounds topped with butter, caviar, and mayonnaise, garnished with watercress.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Lemon and watercress match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 3% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 579 recipes. Both carry coumarin, which smells sweet, hay. The science ↓

Caviar Canapés

6 rounds

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the bread

  1. Stamp out 6 rounds from stale bread, each 2¼ inches wide and ¼ inch thick.

  2. Fry the rounds in butter until golden yellow, then drain and let them cool.

Assemble and serve

  1. Spread butter on the cooled rounds.

  2. Layer fresh caviar over each round.

  3. Completely cover the surfaces with cold mayonnaise sauce.

  4. Serve on a flat dish garnished with watercress.

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. Lemon + watercresstop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together579 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  2. Lemon + peppertop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together27,047 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

  3. Bread + buttertop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,232 recipes

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

  4. Pepper + watercresstop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together983 recipes

    Shared aroma: coumarin (sweet, hay).

  5. Butter + caviartop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together107 recipes

    Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).

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

What each ingredient does

Stale bread
Forms the crisp base that holds the toppings.
Butter
Browns the bread when fried and adds rich flavor.
Fresh caviar
Provides the salty, briny topping that is the dish's main flavor.
Mayonnaise sauce
Adds fat and creaminess that coats the surface and softens the bread.

The step that matters

Fry the rounds in butter until golden yellow. Frying until golden builds a sturdy, crisp base that resists moisture from the mayonnaise. Underfried bread stays soft and soggy, while overbrowned bread turns bitter.

Swap the lemon

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (bread, butter, caviar, sauce, pepper, watercress):

  1. Lemonthe original
  2. Avocadofits about as well
  3. Limefits less well
  4. Grapefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against bread, butter, caviar, sauce, pepper, watercress. 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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