Penguin bao buns. Thai curry Santa hats. Spaghetti carbonara cups. These are just a few of the ‘canapés’ you’ll see on shelves in December, as supermarkets rush to sate our appetite for food that’s tiny, beige and festive. They’re a far cry from the canapés that emerged in the mid-18th century, and which referred exclusively to a type of hors d’oeuvres consisting of something on bread – yet that is their derivation. The French word for couch is canapé, and to the mind of chefs at the time, these portable, bite-sized snacks resembled a couch – seen as the base supporting a person, who was the topping.
“A single cold canapé, if very carefully composed, may be placed upon each guest’s plate as a prelude to the dinner when oysters are out of season,” wrote the fabulously named Colonel Arthur Robert Kenney-Herbert, an officer in the British Indian Army who wrote about cooking while stationed in India in the late 19th century. Back then (and particularly there, where preserved foods were preferable at the time), canapés proved popular precisely because they consisted of things on bread. “Ox tongue, devilled ham, potted meats, fancy butters, herrings and sardine, pilchards in oil… thin bread and butter, wafer biscuits… provide us with a goodly list from which to choose our tasty morsels,” he continues: in other words, leftover carbs coupled with tinned or canned food that could be tracked down in larders everywhere from Bombay to London.
Selection of canapés from Savoy
Canapés and champagne
Not that this was a British interpretation of the canapé, by any means: by that time, class-conscious Victorians were enamoured with French gastronomy, an obsession that reached its apotheosis in London’s grand Savoy hotel. Here, Auguste Escoffier – the king of chefs and the chef of kings, as he was known – set strict standards for the canapé, as he did for so much of restaurant dining in Britain at the time. “As a general rule, the canapé is to be composed of bread, a spread or oil, one main ingredient, and a simple garnish,” he wrote in his seminal cookbook, Le Guide Culinaire. They were served prior to the starter, when guests were already sitting down for dinner – for to eat standing up was to align oneself with the unwashed, undesirable street food-eating Victorian poor – and they were never more than two bites. “This method is correct, quick and gives the opportunity for individual artistry.”
“They didn’t change for years,” explains Susan Scott, the Savoy’s in-house archivist, who talks me through various menus served in the Savoy in the first part of the 20th century. “Through most of that century they were tiny mouthfuls with a solid bottom: caviar, sardines or smoked salmon on toast, canapé Diane (chicken livers on toast) or devils on horseback. They were tiny mouthfuls, served as part of the meal.” Across the Atlantic, canapés were undergoing their own separate evolution, as Prohibition forced booze underground and fuelled the need for stomach-lining finger food in the speakeasies that sprung down around the country. When the ban on alcohol was finally lifted in 1933, the practice of serving inhalable finger foods at bars and parties became a beloved culinary tradition in the States; yet it took a while to make its way to Britain.
Through most of that century they were tiny mouthfuls with a solid bottom
The turning point was during the 1950s, when, as historian Pen Vogler says, “The cocktail party is where it begins to change.” Vogler’s book, Scoff: A History of Food and Class in Britain, explores our eating habits, and their origins in class-based prejudice. “Standing up with a cocktail in hand, you could eat and still be elegant,” she adds. Constance Spry, whose eponymous cookbook was legendary in Britain in the 1950s, included several canapé recipes in her section on cocktail parties, with instructions as to whether they should be handed around or left on sideboards or trollies; consumed stood up, or whilst sitting. They still largely revolved around bread and pastry, however – and they were still homemade, or at least home-assembled. Revolving around preserved foods meant they lent themselves well to post-war rationing. Then the 1980s arrived and, as Rivals reminds us weekly, everything went extra: from clothes to cocktails, canapés to copulation.
Steamer basket canapés
“There was money,” says Eric Treuille: owner of Books for Cooks, a cookbook shop in West London, and author of one of the few dedicated canapé cookbooks. “People had money, started to entertain, you could buy blinis from M&S and everyone became very posh very quickly.” In continental Europe, canapés (and canapé-adjacent foods like tapas or aperitivo) remained a prelude to the meal, but in the UK, as in America, it was free from such shackles. “It was extrapolated out, and became a subject in its own right,” Treuille continues. Realising that if you gave people food as well as booze they’d hang around longer, events planners incorporated canapés into their offering. “Launches, openings, fashion, art, cars – it’s a way of keeping people in one place in order to sell them something; of keeping their attention.” Some had a bread or pastry base, some didn’t, as caterers looked for increasingly inventive ways to make a splash; yet the word canapé prevailed, being (thanks to our lingering association of ‘French’ with ‘high-end’) far preferable to the more prosaic term ‘finger food’.
Meanwhile, in the domestic sphere, supermarkets were shaking up the canapé as much as they were everything else, as more women went out to work and convenience foods crept into our cupboards. “The canapé fitted perfectly into the sphere of foods which supermarkets push on us which we don’t need,” observes Vogler, pointing toward the snack culture that took the UK by storm during the latter half of the 20th century. By the time dinky brie and cranberry pastries were hitting plastic trays, our love of crisps and dip was firmly established. “Outside of meals, canapés are just posh Monster Munch. They are something shops can sell, when they can’t sell any more meals. The cocktail party and our snack obsession collided like a massive wave and swept everything before them,” she adds.
A selection of canapés
Tasty canapés on spoons
That’s the more cynical view: that canapés tapped into our growing tendency to “eat anything, at any time. That’s the difference between here and the rest of Europe,” Treuille observes. Yet while it’s true we will devour sushi as a mid-morning snack as readily as we will scarf a croissant on the way home from work, our love of canapés also reflects something more positive about the national psyche: what Vogler calls our openness to “constantly absorbing other cultures.” “We’re still hierarchal in how we think about food, but we accord hierarchy to being open-minded and eating from different food cultures – and to eating different foods to our parents,” she continues. “We’re always looking to reinvent foods to make them more fashionable than the foods which were fashionable the year before” – hence, I suppose, the fact that this year everything comes drizzled with hot honey.
As such, canapés are a mirror to the culinary trends of the time: both the macro, like gluten-free – another factor fuelling the bread and pastry-less canapé – and the micro, like pistachios or nduja. “If gochujang is a trend, you’ll find it on a canapé. Ferments, pickles, kewpie mayo – we’ve seen them all,” laughs Milli Taylor, head chef at Ottolenghi Test Kitchen. Taylor spent much of her early career in events catering and in 2014 wrote a cookbook called Party Perfect Bites, which focused on small food for entertaining and continues to sell well a decade later.
“They follow food trends because, with canapés, nothing is impossible,” Truille agrees. “With some imagination and a formula, you can do whatever you want.” Indeed, his desire to share his “magic canapé formula” was what inspired his own successful book, 15 years before. “I wanted to enable people to take a recipe for anything – curry, lasagne, casserole – and turn it into a canapé; something that could sit on a plate, and go from plate to someone’s mouth. I thought, if people had a formula, they could do anything.”
Structural integrity is also key – we’ve all experienced an exploding croquette surprise
This is not as simple as dividing a dish into bite-sized amounts. “Anyone can make a lasagne, but not everyone can make a lasagne canapé,” says Truille. There are strict criteria – particularly now we’re post bowl food and skewers. “It was here for a bit, but it doesn’t serve the same purpose,” says Taylor of both. “People have to be able to pick it up, stick it in their mouth and manage to continue the conversation.” A bowl or skewer, which necessitates holding something or putting a drink down, or a canapé that demands multiple bites, “means looking at each other awkwardly and interrupting the flow.” Structural integrity is also key – we’ve all experienced an exploding croquette surprise – as well as something that is “beautiful, because with canapés you eat with your eyes” – more so than with any other dish, proponents argue.
“There’s a real art to the canapé – it takes an awful lot of precision and skill to create something so small, ensure that it’s full of flavour and also that it is captivating visually,” says so-called Queen of canapés, Caroline Hall, co-founder of Rocket Food, one of London’s leading catering companies. She describes canapés as “little jewels” – a sentiment echoed by everyone I speak to who creates canapés for a living. Indeed, the intersection between art and food is as apparent here as in patisserie. “They serve as the first impression of our culinary artistry, embodying our commitment to excellence” says Gerald Quadros, Executive Chef of The Savoy. “We pride ourselves on delivering canapés that feel as unique as our setting.”
A festive collection of canapés
“I like intricate work in general. I like drawing and painting,” Taylor explains. “I have seen other chefs lose their rag because it’s so fiddly – but I enjoy creating something really beautiful, that will be appreciated.” After all, nothing in the world disappears quite so fast or with as much enthusiasm as canapés at an event. “There’s never any wastage at all. Even when you think the party is slowing down, there is always someone tucked in some corner who will hoover them.”
Taylor maintains that part of the appeal of canapés is that they are so small. “We’re obsessed with the miniature in the UK,” she laughs. “Put a canapé in front of someone and they find it cute, whereas France and Italy are much more traditional in their aperitif snacks – it’s more quality ham and butter, or chunks of aged parmesan with balsamic vinegar.” Yet the Brits, with their predilection for model railways, model villages, table football and doll houses, were primed for bite-sized versions of full meals: hence mini fish and chips, beef wellingtons, burgers and hot dogs being more or less constant. This is as true of high-end hotels as it is supermarkets: the Savoy’s most recent canapés pay tribute to historical dishes like mini Arnold Bennett tartelette or Peach Melba popsicles. They’re classier, sure, and take more than nine minutes in a 180°C oven – but they’re no different in essence to Waitrose carbonara cups, or Sainsbury’s mini pie collection.
An array of canapés
Canapés displayed on a slab
So what next, I ask Truille who, as the proprietor of a cookbook shop is bound to know where canapés are headed – at least within the home. He argues we’ll go back to the basics, but everything will be better quality. “It will be better ingredients, rather than more sophisticated recipes. Still salmon on pieces of bread, but better salmon, on great sourdough.” The supermarket’s beige selection packs will continue to have a hold on our hearts – how could they not? – but perhaps this will wane as people realise how cost-effective making one’s own can be. “Yes they’re laborious, and they take hours of prep – but a small amount of food feeds so many!” Taylor says. “We’d arrive with four cool boxes, and clients could never believe we would comfortably feed 300 people.”
Ever since the pandemic, I’ve made my own – and been delighted by the freedom from supermarket’s plastic trays, and by how so little food can go such a long way. “They’re a brilliant way to entertain lots of guests in a cost-effective and interesting fashion,” says Hall. “There’s also something quite freeing about working with smaller portions.” Perhaps another canapé recipe book will emerge, and we’ll be inspired to canapé ever more complex dishes from the comfort of our kitchen at home. More likely, though, we’ll leave that to the professionals and revert back to our ancestors, spreading flavoured butters on bread, draping posh anchovies over crisps – and perhaps popping the odd prawn toast out of a plastic tray. After all, the canapé criteria on which everyone, chef or civilian agrees, is that they should be undeniably joyous.
