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Brunette or Brown Cheese Sandwiches
Take brown bread loaf; spread over the end, after cutting off the crust, with soft, lightly salted, creamed butter; then a layer of cream Neufchatel, or cottage cheese. Then slice about 1/4 inch thick. Butter the end as before. Use crisp, carefully washed lettuce that has been shaken dry. Dip a leaf into French dressing; place it upon the cheese, to which a seasoning of red or black pepper is always an addition. Then cut the next slice very thin; press it gently upon the lettuce. By pressing the palm on the upper slice the two will be made to adhere. White or rye bread cheese sandwiches can be made as the above, also pumpernickel.
The unusual part of this recipe is the order of operations: the loaf is buttered and topped on its cut face before the slice is cut off, so the bread never has to be handled while soft. Everything else is a plain cheese-and-lettuce sandwich.
- The hinge: butter the loaf, then sliceDressing the end of the whole loaf and cutting the slice afterwards lets you spread firmly on a supported surface, which is how you get a very thin slice that does not tear. Use a long serrated knife and a day-old loaf; fresh bread compresses under the blade.
- NeufchatelIn American books of this period Neufchatel is the fresh, unripened cream cheese sold in tubs or foil bricks, not the bloomy-rind French Neufchâtel. Modern block cream cheese or the lower-fat Neufchâtel sold beside it both work; let it soften to room temperature so it spreads without dragging.
- Brown breadHere this most likely means a wholemeal or graham-flour yeast loaf rather than the steamed molasses Boston brown bread, which does not slice thin from a crusted loaf. A dense wholewheat sandwich loaf is the right substitute.
- Creamed butterButter beaten soft, to about mayonnaise consistency, so it spreads without tearing the surface and helps keep the cheese and dressing from soaking the crumb. The recipe specifies lightly salted.
- Dressing the lettuceDip the leaf and let the excess run off; a soaked leaf will wet the crumb within minutes. French dressing in books of this period means oil, vinegar, salt and pepper whisked to order, sharper and thinner than bottled dressing today.
- Red pepperRed pepper means cayenne. A pinch is enough against fresh cheese; paprika is the milder option if you want the colour without heat.
- Assembly and holdingPressing with the flat of the palm rather than the fingertips spreads the pressure and keeps the thin top slice intact. These are made to be eaten within an hour or two; the dressed lettuce will not survive being packed overnight.
- YieldNot given. A standard sandwich loaf worked through this way would give something in the region of 8 to 10 sandwiches.
Sandwich chapters swelled in American household books between about 1890 and 1915, driven by the afternoon tea, the club luncheon and the new fashion for packed picnic and railway food. Fresh cheese sandwiches like this one belong to that moment: factory-made fresh cheese sold under the borrowed name Neufchatel had become widely available, and it gave home cooks a soft, mild spread that needed no cooking and behaved well against butter. The instruction to build on the end of the loaf and cut afterwards appears in other sandwich recipes of the period, from a time before uniformly sliced bread was sold and when the mark of a good sandwich was how thin the bread could be got. The alternate breads offered at the end — white, rye, pumpernickel — may reflect the growing presence of German and Central European bakeries in American cities.