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Tomato Sandwiches
2 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1 cupful water 1/2 cupful vinegar 2 eggs well beaten 1 teaspoonful salt 1 teaspoonful mustard 1 tablespoonful flour 1 1/2 tablespoonfuls sugar Few grains red pepper Firm ripe tomatoes Bread Whipped cream Mix sugar, flour, salt, mustard and red pepper together, add eggs, vinegar, Crisco, and water and cook in double boiler until thick, stirring all the time. To every tablespoonfuls of dressing add equal quantity of whipped cream. Skin and slice tomatoes very thin, dip slices into dressing and place between thin slices of buttered bread. Cut into finger shaped pieces. Sufficient for thirty sandwiches.
This is a boiled dressing — an egg-thickened cooked mayonnaise substitute — lightened with whipped cream and used as the moisture in a tea sandwich. The dressing makes far more than thirty sandwiches need, so plan on leftovers.
- The hinge: keep the dressing off direct heatThe eggs, flour and vinegar must thicken in a double boiler over water that is barely simmering, with constant stirring. Direct heat or a hard boil will curdle the eggs into visible curds; pull it when it coats the spoon, around 170-180F.
- CriscoThe book is a Crisco advertisement, and Crisco at this period was a hydrogenated cottonseed shortening. Modern Crisco is reformulated but works; 2 tablespoons of butter or a neutral oil gives the same result in a dressing this sharp.
- Vinegar strengthHalf a cup of vinegar to one cup of water is aggressive by modern taste, and the recipe does not say which vinegar; strength was not standardised as today's 5 percent is. Taste the finished dressing and thin with water if it bites.
- Fold the cream in at the last minuteCream is added tablespoon for tablespoon only as you assemble. Chill the cooked base first — warm dressing deflates whipped cream — and do not fold more than you will use, as the mixture separates within a few hours.
- Keeping the bread drySlice the tomatoes thin, lay them on a rack or paper for ten minutes with a little salt, then blot. Butter the bread right to the edges; the butter acts as a moisture barrier.
- Skinning tomatoesTen to fifteen seconds in boiling water and then into cold water loosens the skin without cooking the flesh. A very ripe tomato can often be peeled with a sharp paring knife alone.
- Yield and assemblyThirty finger sandwiches means about twenty slices of bread, i.e. ten sandwiches cut into thirds. Assemble no more than an hour ahead, cover with a damp cloth, and keep refrigerated; these will not hold overnight.
- Leftover dressingThe cooked base, without cream, keeps three or four days covered in the refrigerator and is good on cold chicken or potato salad.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and published by Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, which had come on the market in 1911 as a vegetable substitute for lard — hence the two tablespoons of shortening in a salad dressing, standing in for the butter a period cook would have used. The dressing itself is a boiled dressing, the standard American alternative to mayonnaise in an era when whisking raw oil into egg by hand was tedious and the result unreliable in a warm kitchen; flour and cooked egg gave a stable, tangy sauce that kept in an icebox. Thin tomato sandwiches cut into fingers were a fixture of the afternoon tea table and the ladies' luncheon on both sides of the Atlantic through the first half of the twentieth century, and the whipped cream folded in here is the period's usual trick for turning a sharp cooked dressing into something delicate enough for the occasion.