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Salad Sandwiches
Prepare the bread in the usual way, and have ready some mustard and cress, water-cress, all well washed and dried; put them into a bowl with mayonnaise sauce, and when ready for serving, spread the salad neatly between the bread.
A one-paragraph Victorian tea sandwich that assumes you already know the house method for bread and mayonnaise. Two things decide whether it works: the greens must be bone dry, and the sandwich must be built at the last minute.
- "Prepare the bread in the usual way"The book leaves this to the reader, who is assumed to know the house method. Victorian sandwich practice was thin slices of a day-old white loaf, crusts removed and lightly buttered; butter also serves as a moisture barrier between a wet salad and the crumb, though this recipe does not specify it.
- Mustard and cressSold in Britain as punnets of mustard and garden-cress seedlings, cut at a couple of inches with the seed leaves still on. If you cannot find it, use micro-greens, or substitute a peppery salad cress or very finely shredded watercress leaves — but not full-grown arugula, which overwhelms the mayonnaise.
- WatercressBuy it fresh and use the leaves and the tender upper stems only; older stalks are stringy in a thin sandwich. Wash well, since watercress is grown in flowing water and holds grit.
- Drying the greens"Well washed and dried" is the hinge of the whole thing. A salad spinner followed by a few minutes on a towel is not excessive — residual water thins the mayonnaise and soaks the bread through.
- The mayonnaiseDress lightly, just enough to coat and bind; a heavily dressed salad slides out when the sandwich is bitten. If you are making mayonnaise for this, note it will contain raw egg, so use pasteurised eggs for anyone vulnerable, or a good bought jar.
- TimingDress the greens in the bowl and leave them; combine with the bread only as the plate goes out, as the recipe says. Salt in the mayonnaise will draw water from the cress if it stands too long.
- Yield and servingRoughly a punnet of cress plus a bunch of watercress and 3–4 tablespoons of mayonnaise will fill six slices, cut into fingers or triangles. Cover with a barely damp cloth for the short wait before serving.
Cress sandwiches belong to the Victorian tea table, when the thin buttered bread-and-butter sandwich had, by loose convention, come to sit somewhere between the bread and the cake of afternoon tea. Watercress and mustard-and-cress were among the cheapest and most abundant green things in a British city: watercress was farmed in the chalk streams of Hampshire and Kent and carried into London by rail for the early markets, where it was hawked in bunches and eaten out of hand, while mustard-and-cress could be raised on a windowsill in under a fortnight and so appeared in kitchen gardens and in the back yards of houses with no garden at all. Cassell's, a work of the 1870s, places the recipe among sandwiches rather than salads, and gives it in the same clipped shorthand it uses elsewhere.