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SALAD SANDWICHES (another way)
Take some thin slices of bread. Butter these slightly, and just before they are to be eaten lay between two of them a little salad, washed, dried, and tossed lightly in mayonnaise sauce. Press the sandwiches closely together, cut them into small neat pieces, and serve.
A two-line recipe with one real requirement: the salad must be bone dry and the sandwich assembled at the last moment, or the bread turns to paste.
- Dry the leaves properlyWashed leaves hold far more water than they look to. A salad spinner followed by a few minutes on a clean towel is the difference between a crisp sandwich and a soggy one.
- "Just before they are to be eaten"This is the hinge of the recipe. Dressed leaves begin to weep within minutes; butter on both slices slows it, but the sandwiches will not hold for an hour, let alone travel.
- What "salad" means hereIn a Victorian kitchen this is likely lettuce, such as cos or cabbage lettuce, sometimes with mustard and cress, watercress or a little cucumber. The washed, dried and lightly tossed leaves of the recipe do not suggest a composed salad with potato or meat.
- Butter first, and to the edgesThe thin layer of butter is a moisture barrier as much as a seasoning. Have it soft enough to spread without tearing thin bread, and take it right to the crusts.
- MayonnaisePeriod mayonnaise was made fresh with raw yolk and used within the day; commercial jarred mayonnaise is made with pasteurised egg and serves well enough here. Toss the leaves lightly, so they are barely slicked rather than coated.
- The breadA close-crumbed white loaf, cut thin, is what is meant. Chilling the loaf briefly makes thin slicing much easier.
- Cutting and yield"Small neat pieces" is not defined further; by tea-table convention that means crusts off and a cut into fingers or triangles, four to a round. On that basis six rounds of bread gives roughly a dozen small sandwiches.
Cassell's gives more than one version of the salad sandwich, which suggests how firmly the sandwich had settled into the late-Victorian tea table and picnic basket. Thin bread, crusts removed, cut into small pieces and eaten with the fingers belongs to afternoon tea rather than to a meal, and the instruction to assemble at the last moment suits a kitchen where sandwiches were made in the pantry and carried straight through. Mayonnaise had become a familiar sauce in English cookery books during the nineteenth century by way of French practice, and its appearance here as a casual binding for lettuce, rather than as a dressed sauce for fish or fowl, suggests how far it had travelled down the menu.