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Tomato and Horseradish Sandwiches
1 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1/4 cupful grated horseradish 1 tomato Bread 1/4 cupful mayonnaise Salt and paprika to taste Parsley Mix Crisco, horseradish, and mayonnaise together. Skin and slice tomato, sprinkle with salt and paprika. Spread thin slices of bread and butter with Crisco mixture, and put sliced tomato between, cut into fancy shapes and garnish with parsley.
Sufficient for ten sandwiches.
A tea-sandwich filling from a book written to promote Crisco, which explains the shortening in a spread that would otherwise be butter. The single thing that decides whether these succeed is managing the water in the tomato.
- Drain the tomatoSliced tomato sitting against bread will soak it through within minutes. Salt the slices, lay them on paper towel for 10-15 minutes, and blot both sides before assembling.
- The CriscoIt is here because the book was published by Procter & Gamble to sell it. Softened butter gives better flavour and mouthfeel at the same quantity; cream cheese makes a firmer spread that also seals the bread against the tomato.
- HorseradishA quarter cup of freshly grated root is fiercely hot and dry. Jarred prepared horseradish is milder and packed in vinegar or brine, so drain it well and press out the liquid or the spread will slacken and weep.
- "Bread and butter"The wording is ambiguous, but in a book written to substitute Crisco for butter the likeliest reading is that the Crisco mixture takes the place of butter rather than going on top of it. One thin, even layer on each slice, right to the edges, so the crumb is protected.
- Bread choiceUse a firm, close-grained sandwich loaf a day old, sliced thin. Fresh soft bread tears under a spread this stiff and will not hold a cut shape.
- Cutting fancy shapesAssemble the whole sandwich, then cut with a sharp knife or a plain cutter; crusts off. Trimming before filling only makes the layers slide apart.
- PaprikaAt the time this would have meant sweet paprika, used as much for colour as for heat. Smoked Spanish paprika is a different thing and will dominate the horseradish.
- Yield and timingTen small tea sandwiches, so a few servings as a savoury. Best made shortly before serving and kept covered with a damp cloth in the refrigerator; filled tomato sandwiches will not sit well for long.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble, and every recipe in it is built around Crisco, the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening the company had introduced a few years earlier. That commercial purpose is visible here: a tablespoon of shortening does nothing for a horseradish spread that butter would not do better, but it puts the product on the page. The sandwich itself belongs to the American tea-table tradition of the 1900s and 1910s, when thin crustless bread cut into rounds, diamonds and hearts and garnished with parsley was standard afternoon fare, and when the tomato was a well-established fresh ingredient in American cookery. Horseradish, grated from the root and used quickly before it lost its bite, was a common foil for cold beef and fish; pairing it with raw tomato in a mayonnaise base is the sort of light savoury a hostess would set out alongside sweeter sandwiches.