Spread thin slices of rye bread with butter and caviare; some slices of white bread with butter and thin slices of ham; some slices of pumpernickel bread with butter and a layer of cottage cheese; and some slices of brown bread with butter and cold cooked chicken sliced thin. Put all into a press under a heavy weight for one hour; then cut into perpendicular slices and serve.
This is a pressed layered sandwich in the zakuski tradition, not four separate sandwiches: the buttered slices are stacked into one loaf-like block, weighted, then cut across the layers so each portion shows all four fillings.
- The hinge: butter on every faceButter is doing structural work here, sealing each slice against moisture from the caviare and cheese so the block holds together under pressure. Use it soft and spread it edge to edge, not sparingly.
- Build it as one blockAlternate the four breads and fillings into a single stack. The recipe never says how high, so judge it by what your press and knife will manage; a stack of eight to ten slices is a workable guess.
- PressingA cutting board with two or three tins on it is enough weight. Wrap the stack tightly in plastic film first, and press it in the refrigerator rather than on the counter, since ham, chicken, cheese and caviare should not sit at room temperature for an hour.
- "Perpendicular slices"Cut down through the layers with a long serrated knife, so the cut face is striped. Slices about half an inch thick hold; thinner ones fall apart.
- Caviare in 1900Caviare -- The book means salted sturgeon roe, considerably cheaper in its own day than now. Any firm salted roe works for the effect: lumpfish, trout roe or salmon roe drained well, as excess brine will soak the rye.
- Cottage cheeseLikely something drier than the modern tub: closer to a pressed dry curd, of the sort Russian tvorog represents. Supermarket cottage cheese is too wet; drain it, or use farmer's cheese or a dry curd, or the layer will slump.
- Pumpernickel and brown breadPumpernickel means a dense dark rye, and that dense style is what presses well. Modern light "brown bread" or soft sandwich rye compresses to paste, so choose close-crumbed loaves for all four layers.
- YieldCut at half an inch, an ordinary sandwich loaf's width gives roughly eight pieces per stack, which suits it to serving as an appetiser.
The dish belongs to the Russian zakuski table, the spread of small salted and pickled things — caviare, cured fish, cured meats, curd cheese, dark breads — that opened a formal meal and that Western cookbooks of the late nineteenth century seized on as the height of cosmopolitan entertaining. What this book calls a "Russian sandwich" is essentially those zakuski compressed into a single sliceable form, a trick also seen in the pressed picnic loaves popular in the same decades. Its presence in a day-by-day collection of dishes from many countries says a good deal about the period: a hostess with a rye loaf, a jar of caviare and some cold chicken could put a foreign country on the table in an hour, and the four different breads — rye, white, pumpernickel, brown — were themselves a small display of a well-stocked larder.