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Flour Mixtures Continued: Bread and Other Yeast Mixtures: Sandwiches
OLIVE SANDWICHES Chop a dozen olives; spread bread prepared for sandwiches with mayonnaise dressing or butter and then with the chopped olives. Press together in pairs. If desired a leaf of lettuce or a branch or two of cress may be set between the two parts of the sandwich.
BACON SANDWICHES If convenient the bacon should be fresh cooked. Set the slices while hot between the buttered bread, prepared as usual. Press together and wrap singly in waxed paper.
NOISETTE SANDWICHES Prepare "noisette" bread for sandwiches; spread with butter and with orange marmalade and press together in pairs.
CHEESE AND HERRING SANDWICHES 1 Cream cheese 2 Herring Fillets 2 teaspoonfuls of Beef Ex- Brown or white bread tract Work the cheese and beef extract to a smooth paste. Any herring may be used, but those put up in oil are preferable. Such herring are usually choice and tender. Cut the fillets into tiny pieces. Spread the bread with the cheese mixture, sprinkle on the bits of herring and press together in pairs.
Four tea-sandwich formulas from a book written for very small households. Nothing here needs cooking except the bacon, so the work is all in the bread and the proportions.
- "Bread prepared for sandwiches"In books of this period this generally meant a close-grained white or brown loaf, a day old, sliced thin with the crusts cut off. Day-old bread slices cleanly and takes butter without tearing; fresh bakery bread will drag.
- Noisette bread"noisette" is French for hazelnut, so this is presumably a nut bread, a plain white or milk dough with chopped nuts worked in; the quotation marks point to a formula given elsewhere in the book. Any nut loaf, or a good raisin-nut bread, works with the marmalade.
- Beef extractLiebig's, Bovril or Armour's extract of beef: a thick, intensely salty meat paste sold in a jar. Bovril or a beef bouillon concentrate is the modern equivalent, and two teaspoons is a lot — start with one and taste, since the herring is salty too.
- Cream cheese, 1909Cream cheese -- a fresh, soft, unstabilized curd cheese closer to today's Neufchâtel than to a foil-wrapped brick. "1 cream cheese" meant a small retail package, on the order of 3 oz. Modern block cream cheese needs to come fully to room temperature before it will take the extract smoothly.
- Herring in oilThe recipe's preference for oil-packed fillets still holds: they are softer and less aggressively cured than salt or vinegar herring, which would weep into the bread. Drain them well on paper before chopping.
- OlivesGreen brine-cured olives are the likeliest intention. Pit and chop them, then blot the chop dry he wet olive keeps mayonnaise from holding the slices together.
- The bacon sandwich hingeSetting the bacon in hot lets the fat melt into the butter. Assemble straight from the pan and wrap immediately in waxed paper as directed.
- YieldA dozen olives, or one small cheese, should fill roughly four to six thin sandwiches. All four are best eaten within a few hours, wrapped and chilled.
These come from the sandwich pages of a household manual, a genre that grew with city apartment living in the early 1900s, and they show what the afternoon tea table looked like when it had to be assembled from a small pantry. Olives, orange marmalade, cream cheese and above all bottled beef extract were the new convenience goods of the period — extract of beef, developed commercially in the second half of the nineteenth century and sold as both a tonic and a seasoning, turns up constantly in recipes of this date as a shortcut to savory depth. The bacon sandwich wrapped singly in waxed paper is a lunch-pail instruction rather than a tea one: waxed paper was then a fairly recent kitchen staple, and here each sandwich is wrapped by itself for food meant to be carried and eaten cold.