Home › Sandwiches › Egg Sandwiches
Egg Sandwiches
Chop 2 whites of hard-boiled eggs very fine. Put the yolks through a strainer or mash thoroughly with a silver fork. Mix well, season with salt and pepper, moisten with a little mayonnaise or cream salad dressing. Spread on buttered slices of white or entire-wheat bread, cover, and press lightly together. Or slice the whites of the eggs very thin, lay them on the buttered bread, and cover with the seasoned yolks and dressing, then with a crisp lettuce leaf, and finish with a top slice of bread.
A straightforward egg salad sandwich from the era when sandwich fillings were expected to be smooth, pale and finely worked rather than chunky. A few of its assumptions are worth updating.
- YieldTwo eggs will fill two sandwiches thinly spread, one if you like a substantial filling. For four sandwiches, use four eggs and about 3 tablespoons of dressing.
- Hard-boilingCover the eggs with cold water, bring to a boil, then take off the heat and let stand 10-12 minutes; cool at once in cold water. Period instructions often called for much longer boiling, which is the usual cause of the grey-green ring and sulphurous smell.
- The silver forkSilver was almost certainly specified because the iron and steel cutlery of the day was liable to discolour eggs. Any modern stainless fork is fine, and a fine-mesh sieve gives the smoothest result.
- Cream salad dressingA period name that could cover either a cooked, flour-thickened boiled dressing or a plainer cream-based one, generally tarter than mayonnaise. Mayonnaise is the direct substitute; sour cream or creme fraiche with a squeeze of lemon is a reasonable alternative.
- Entire-wheat breadAn old name for whole-wheat. It was a fashionable "health" bread in this period, and the recipe treats it as interchangeable with white.
- Butter the breadNot a flourish. The butter seals the crumb against the moisture in the filling, which matters if the sandwiches are made more than a few minutes ahead.
- SeasoningEgg filling needs more salt than seems reasonable, and it is worth adding a little mustard or a few drops of vinegar; the original may have got some of that lift from the tartness of its dressing.
- Holding timeEgg filling is perishable. Keep the sandwiches refrigerated and eat within a few hours rather than packing them for a long unchilled outing.
Egg sandwiches appear widely in American sandwich chapters from around the 1890s onward, as the sandwich moved out of the tea tray and into lunch pails, picnic hampers and the fashion for cold luncheons. The second method here, with the white sliced thin and laid flat under the seasoned yolk and a lettuce leaf, suits a preference for sandwiches that looked composed when cut, as against the mashed filling that later became the norm. The call for a silver fork looks like a technical instruction rather than a matter of manners: period household writers cautioned that ordinary steel cutlery could darken eggs.