The New York appetising plate: split bagel, cream cheese, cured salmon, red onion, and capers
Origin: Lower East Side, New York, United States
From the journey of Caper.
This is one of the most recognisable food images the United States has produced, and every element of it arrived from somewhere else. The bagel came with Ashkenazi Jews from Poland, where boiled-then-baked rolls had been made since at least the seventeenth century. The cured salmon came from the same tradition by way of the Baltic; lox is from Yiddish laks, cousin to German Lachs and Danish laks, and properly means salt-cured rather than smoked salmon, though almost nobody observes the distinction now. Cream cheese was an American invention of the 1870s that the community adopted wholesale. And the capers came up the same Mediterranean supply line that was feeding Italian New York a few streets away. The shops that assembled it were the appetising stores, a specifically Jewish New York institution created by kosher law: a shop could sell dairy or it could sell meat, not both, so the fish-and-dairy trade became a separate business with its own name. Russ & Daughters has been selling this combination on Houston Street since 1914 and put its daughters' names above the door in 1933, which is generally reckoned the first American business to do so. The capers are doing real work and are not a flourish. Cold cured salmon is fatty, soft, and faintly sweet, and cream cheese compounds all three; something salt, sharp, and firm is needed to cut across it, which is exactly what a caper is for. Red onion supplies bite and tomato supplies acidity, and the plate is balanced by the same logic as a French brown butter sauce, arrived at independently. There is nothing to cook and a fair amount to get right, which is why it is written down here at all. The order of assembly, the thickness of the salmon, and the temperature of the cream cheese all make a visible difference.
Strictly, lox is salt-cured and not smoked, nova is cold-smoked and milder, and gravlax is cured with dill and sugar. All three work; the traditional article is the saltiest of them, which is partly why the capers were needed in the first place. Salt-packed capers, soaked and dried, are better here than brined ones because they hold their shape and are not wet. Pat them thoroughly dry either way, since water on top of cream cheese is unpleasant. Caperberries, halved lengthways, are an excellent and slightly showy alternative and are increasingly seen on appetising platters. For a crowd, serve it deconstructed on a board: bagels split in a basket, cream cheese in a bowl, salmon on a plate, and small dishes of capers, onion, tomato, cucumber, and dill. That is how it is actually eaten at a New York brunch, and it is the sensible way to feed more than four people.
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