How to canapé

A summer celebration is nothing without these tiny works of art. Devised by the country's best canapé cooks, they are just the thing to make your party swing

- Madeleine Silver

CIRCULATING amid a melee of puffed sleeves and to the dulcet tones of The Police there was a dead cert on the 1980s drinks-party scene: the chequerboard canapé. Immaculately cut brown bread and cream cheese, artfully topped with alternating black and red caviar for the effect of a gameboard. "They were hysterical," remembers Somerset-based Victoria Blashford-Snell, who began her foray into catering in the latter part of that decade as a teenager, craned over blanched mangetout, painstakingly piping in cream cheese and filling cocktail sausages with mashed potato.

Nearly 40 years on she's the doyenne of canapés for the smartest weddings and parties in marquees dotted across the rolling hills where Dorset, Somerset and Wiltshire meet, yielding to the demand of clients (this year it's anything that can be made into a croquette, while two years ago everyone wanted mac and cheese) and holding firm on her least favourite of the canapé old guard. "People still worship a mini Yorkshire pudding with roast beef. Men love it but I think it's a bit flabby, so to avoid people asking for it I created a little filo tartlet with English mustard or horseradish mayonnaise, rare beef and caramelised tomatoes."

These tiny morsels are the curtain-raiser on a party, the scene-stealer and the conversation starter. They're the salty prize after a yawn-inducing wedding sermon or the fuel to study the form, race-card tucked under one arm and champagne in the other. "I always say it's a pre-dinner show reveal. Everyone knows the party's going to be brilliant if the canapés are," says head chef and founder Henrietta Russell at Hampshire-based luxury catering company Peapod & Co, whose canapés are akin to a spellbinding art installation.