Cocktails and canapes

The other weekend it was Valentines' Day and some friends and I thought the perfect way to treat ourselves was to have some cocktails and canapes. By the amount we produced you'd think we were catering for more than an intimate party of 4, but who'd want to share all of these delights with too many people? With less munchers to steal all the best bits it ended up being a joyful feast rather than just a nibble with drinks.

We consulted a few online sources for inspiration, looking at vintage recipes and also the lovely recipe book born of the Chocolate and Zucchini blog. The menu was I suppose a bit of a homage to our idea of cocktail parties of the past, with prawn cocktail, salmon and cream cheese vol-au-vents (heart-shaped of course) and Ritz crackers, smoked mackerel pate on circles of brown bread, spanish omelette, prawn cocktail, cheese and cumin gougeres (unbelievably moreish) and Black Forest gateau (not homemade, I admit).

One thing I don't think we banked on was how long it took to make all this stuff. It's all just so damn finicky. That's one thing I've noticed about the evolution of food for entertaining over the years. While you might find vol-au-vents and dainty sandwiches at parties these days, the vol-au-vent cases are probably bought in frozen-ready, and it doesn't take too much to throw together a few rounds of sandwiches. Even less labour-intensive are the ever popular mediterranean-style spreads of pots of houmous, cold sliced meats and salamis, bowls of olives, casually torn chunks of bread etc, all of which can be bought pre-prepared and laid out in 10 minutes.

But looking at recipe books from the 50s to the 70s, if a food stuff could be fussed with in some way, it was worth doing. Decoration and bite-sized daintiness was encouraged - why would you serve a bowl of egg mayonnaise when you can halve boiled eggs, scoop out the yolk, mash it up with mayonnaise and pipe it back in (a la 'devilled eggs' - you can even dye them blue and pink for an extra flourish)? Takes 10 times longer but hey, what else were you going to do today? And it would be the height of bad manners to expect your guests to have to help themselves to pate and bread, what they want is it pre-cut into neat circles and topped with the pate and perhaps a garnish. The thing is that it's all very repetitive - you might enjoy filling the first one or two vol-au-vent cases prettily with filling, but those things are small and deceptively moreish, so if you've got a proper party going on you're going to have to do that maybe 20-30 times.

Drinks-wise, we made some classic cocktails, including old-fashioneds (sugar cube soaked in bitters; add ice and a touch of soda; then top with bourbon and an orange twists) and martinis (vodka poured over ice cubes tainted with vermouth, strained into a glass with a green olive) and basically concluded that a lot of original cocktails were devised as a way of drinking pure undiluted spirits while still looking refined and not-at-all like an alcoholic. The rather soupy green stuff to the left in a 'kiwi-tini' which we enthusiastically concocted, thinking that after all the pastry, eggs, cream cake, pate and pure alcohol we should probably get some vitamin C.