The Elusive Bite

Lesson Two: Hors d'oeuvres are more than the sum of their parts. You must consider variations in temperature, texture (crunch versus squish), visual appeal. Balance. Color. Shape. Presentation. Timing. Charm. Do not start with flavors that are too intense, too explosive, lest you risk numbing the palate to subsequent dishes. Go for interesting contrasts. Tease. It is the Miss Universe pageant of food condensed into the size of a half-dollar. Anything can be employed toward the creation of hors d'oeuvres. Cookie cutters, melon ballers, X-acto knives, strips of bamboo. It is an exercise of the imagination.

In certain circles, chef Eric says, there are entire separate professional kitchens devoted exclusively to the preparation of hors d'oeuvres. We pause to picture it.

The Alpha Crowd

VARIATIONS ON THE ONE-TO-TWO-BITE THEME stretch out into infinity: stuffed mushrooms, stuffed mushrooms with cheese, stuffed mushrooms with cheese and caviar. Martha Stewart's Hors d'Oeuvres Handbook is an orgy of hors d'oeuvres. Savory mousses are piped into foods so small they have no business being stuffed: radishes, strawberries, cherry tomatoes, grapes, quail eggs. Will I know the perfect hors d'oeuvre when I bite it? Will it taste like heaven? Will it look stunning and will it make me look stunning just to hold it?

At the kitchen of Dana Williams of Bread & Wine catering, I learn what celebrities are biting. Her apartment is messily artsy. But her clients are the people who are in the business of perfect: Vogue, Cameron Diaz, Reese Witherspoon and Ryan Phillippe, Halle Berry, Diesel clothing, InStyle. In less than a year, Bread & Wine has had a fast rise to fame, fueled by clever little bites. I wonder what deal with what devil has been struck.

Williams, however, is sweet and down-to-earth. She bustles about guilelessly. Caterer is the latest in a succession of different careers: sculptor, ceramicist, actress, mommy. Her hors d'oeuvres are pretty, fanciful. Rose-water-and-citrus simple-syrup marinated fruit skewers punched into flower shapes with Japanese cutters. Smoked-salmon tea sandwiches on black bread. Asparagus tied up with nori ribbons. "White trash" ding-dong cakes with paper ladybugs and fairies. Lemon cookies fashioned into chokers.

"Those were for a Bacardi Limon party. People were running around biting each other's necks," she says.

The menu for Portia di Rossi's party is tacked to the refrigerator. Edible flowers are on the list.

"What should an hors d'oeuvre do?" I ask.

"It should be beautiful, fabulous."

Everyone Else

AT AN ENGAGEMENT PARTY IN THE VALLEY, I LEARN what the masses are biting. There are 5 million people in Los Angeles, each and every one of them searching for the perfect bite. Chef Eric Greenstein of Contemporary Catering has a very long list of hors d'oeuvres for his very large, very extensively staffed clients: PC/Mac Mall, LAX, the Greater Los Angeles Jewish Federation ("We made 8,000 latkes for them!"). There's a wheel of Brie with crispbread. Mini-crab cakes. Mini-bagel dogs with ketchup and mustard. Mini-quiche. A server in black tuxedo stirs up 18 individual cup-size dollops of mashed potato at the mashed-potato bar.

I'm holding a mini-éclair on a napkin with the names of the bride and groom printed in purple ink. "What should an hors d'oeuvre do?"

"It has to be user-friendly. Most people," he whispers conspiratorially, "don't want anything too far-out."

Where I Went To Find the Far Gone

THE INTERNET. IT IS THE ARCHIVE OF cocktail weenies, Swedish meatballs, baby gherkins, deviled eggs, Spam. A Web site called Recipes of the Damned talks about an alarming hors d'oeuvre from Kraft circa 1960 called the "Burning Bush." You paddle a lump of cream cheese into a ball. You coat it in chipped beef. Then you toothpick it and stab it onto a grapefruit dome. Sadly, you don't actually set it on fire.

On the Web, all the phases of hors d'oeuvre history spring to virtual life: '60s psychedelic porcupines, '70s Vienna sausages on colored toothpicks, pools of warm Lipton spinach dip served in '80s sourdough- bread boules. Ethnic warps from the early '90s.

I stumble onto a Web site for a company that has a 60,000-square-foot USDA-approved facility devoted exclusively to the assembly of kebabs. A photo shows rows of factory workers at stainless-steel tables. Like scientists, they wear white lab coats and white hair caps. They spear the meat onto sticks. They place the sticks onto trays. They accept overnight orders — four trays or one case minimum.

Alan Turner, an industrial electrician in Pennsylvania, invented an hors d'oeuvre shaped like a Pokémon. You take a Play-Doh mold, spray it with vegetable oil, load it with 20 cubic centimeters of soft cheese and release. Most intriguing is a lump of Brie extruded into the shape of a Pikachu. It sits atop a square of domestic ham on a Triscuit. It has a round head. It has perky ears. It has a glossy, newborn sheen.

The Perfect Bite

UNEXPECTEDLY, CHEF JEAN-PIERRE Bosc invites me back to Mimosa to teach me how to make two tomato things, one on a puff, one with the non-salty anchovy. "Grrah, not things," he growls. He grabs my notebook and writes, "Tomato tart tatin and stuffed tomato with fennel, piquillos pepper and marinated anchovy." Both the tomato hors d'oeuvres are a labor-intensive process involving knife switching, fine dicing, freezing pastry, baking pastry, slow-roasting for several hours and blending a pistou.