Take a Hike Canapé
This treat is inspired by my own longing to walk familiar paths of the Chugach just outside my window. This recipe is the flavors of a hike from Prospect Heights to Near Point, using ingredients I for...
Couch Canapé
Writer S. Hollis Mickey is a 2024 IACP Food Writing Awards Finalist for this piece.
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A Journey of Small Bites
The couch has been the destination of all my travel of late. Complex chronic disease has forced me into mostly supine convalescence. In the morning, I make my way from bed to couch. This is a humble but important journey. While it may not compare to the mountain peaks I long to recline upon, the couch offers a particular kind of repose. My disease limits my ability to safely or independently leave my home, and riddles my body with challenging symptoms from which I often need to escape. From my couch, food is one way I can travel to find small, accessible delights.
Because I am very limited in my ability to stand or sit up, cooking and eating itself are uniquely… positioned. So foods must now be quickly, simply crafted. And, what is made must be couch friendly: not too messy, without much cutting, slurping, sloshing, or crumbling.
Couched and trying to envision something I could make and eat that fit all these requirements brought me to the canapé. The canapé is an archetypal couch food, literally. The word has Greek origins, derived from kōnōpeion, meaning an Egyptian couch with mosquito curtains. In the English language, canopy took on the meaning of the curtain above the couch. In French, the word refers to furniture. In English, the word may still refer to a specific style of elaborately carved couch that was invented in the mid-18th century, around the same time the French started using the word canapé to also refer to finger foods served to those seated on such furniture.
The French used the term to describe a specific type of hors d’oeuvre: a one- or two-bite bit of bread with topping. The name comes from the bread serving as a couch with a “guest” resting upon it. Most early French recipes are constructed of simple ingredients. These finger foods were rustic fare, not at all what the word canapé now connotes: fussy bites, hardly appearing edible, bejeweled with pearls of caviar and scallion slivers slanted just so. Early canapés were accessible, composed of ingredients already in the larder: leftover ends of loaves, butter or oil, kidneys, pickles, sardines, eggs, beets, sweetbreads. As the classic 1903 cookbook Le Guide Culinaire by Auguste Escoffier states, “as a general rule,” the canapé is to be composed of bread, a spread or oil, one main ingredient, and a simple garnish.
The canapé became popular in America during Prohibition. With alcohol no longer legal in restaurants and bars, covert cocktail parties boomed. Not wanting inebriated guests, hosts turned to canapés so drinks were not consumed on empty stomachs. The term became more widely applied to finger foods. Though, strictly speaking in culinary terms, the canapé still refers specifically to the French “couched” construction as per Le Guide Culinaire: a bready substrate, optional spread, main topping, garnish. Escoffier, chef of the Savoy and the Ritz in Paris, set the standard for canapé (and many a dish) for chefs and culinary schools still use today: “This method is correct, quick and gives the opportunity for individual artistry in presentation.”
Formula allows for freedom, requiring not so much preparation as creative contemplation. Cooking, then, can happen daydreaming on the couch, with just a short trip to the pantry. I have been dreaming up canapés that take me where I wish I could go. Sure, France, the home of the canapé, sounds nice, but where I long to be most is not so far. I want nothing more than to be out in the Alaska landscapes just outside my window. I long to walk slowly with the smell of spruce, discover nettle hiding trailside, feel the rush of air caress my sweaty face thousands of feet up on a peak, and then descend with handfuls of blueberries, heart full of the greetings of this place’s lands. This is the travel I most wish to take from my couch. I can see it and almost taste it.
Which takes me back to the canapé. In summer, Alaska ingredients can be composed into a wide array of variations, allowing for couch canapé travel through a variety of flavor profiles, from shore to tundra. I like to think about canapé composition like crafting a cozy spot on the couch for rest and repose. First, you need the comfy furniture for your composition: a piece of thinly sliced bread, or a cracker. Then, you want to put down a cozy blanket. Think comforting, rich, fatty: a spread of butter, drizzle of infused oil, a schmear of some sort. Next comes the main ingredient—your “guest” to rest on the couch. This can really be anything: a bit of smoked fish, cured harvested meat, umami mushroom, savory cheese, hunk of vegetable, perfectly ripe slice of fruit. Finally, the moment of artistry—the sort of doily on the back of the couch or decorative pillow as it were—the garnish. Consider here Escoffier; allow this to be a little flourish of complementary eye appeal.
In summer, an edible flower, foraged leaf, or locally grown herb make a perfect adornment of your couched delight. Where might the canapé take you? A canapé of cured salmon bedded atop kelp compound butter and garnished with roe evokes dipnetting on the Kenai. A cracker slathered in mascarpone mixed with mint, dolloped with rhubarb jam, and finished with a sliver of balsamic-soaked strawberry transports one to the garden. Warm toast spread with carrot top pesto, layered next with a slice of roasted carrot, and bedazzled with a chive blossom calls up the abundant Alaska farmers markets where the sweetest carrots in the world can be found. The little journeys of the canapé make travel accessible, in a tidy bite or two, even when convalescing on the couch.
This story originally appeared in Issue No. 28, Summer 2023.
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