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Cocoanut Sandwiches
Buttered white bread Lettuce leaves Mayonnaise or boiled dressing Dromedary Cocoanut Cut slices of white bread thin and spread with butter. Place on bottom slice of bread a lettuce leaf, spread with mayonnaise or boiled dressing and over this sprinkle Dromedary Cocoanut. Cover with top slice of bread and cut into finger shaped pieces.
A tea sandwich rather than a lunch sandwich, and it depends entirely on the texture contrast between crisp lettuce and moist shredded coconut. A few notes on the ingredients, which have shifted since the book was printed.
- The coconutPackaged shredded coconut of this period was generally moister and finer-cut than today's heavily sugared "sweetened flake," and probably closer to what is now sold as macaroon coconut, though the exact Dromedary formulation is not documented here. Desiccated unsweetened coconut, briefly rehydrated in a spoonful of warm water or milk and squeezed dry, is nearer the mark; dry flakes will taste dusty against the mayonnaise.
- Boiled dressingThe period alternative to mayonnaise: a cooked custard-style dressing of egg, vinegar, mustard, a little flour or cornstarch and often sugar, thickened over water and cooled. Its tartness and slight sweetness suit coconut better than modern jarred mayonnaise, which is blander and oilier.
- BreadThe recipe says only to cut the slices thin. In practice that suggests a close-grained sandwich loaf, ideally a day old, sliced very thin -- around 1/4 inch. Fresh bakery bread with an open crumb tears under the butter knife; chilling the loaf briefly makes thin slicing easier.
- Butter the bread for a reasonThe butter is a moisture barrier, not a flavoring. Spread it to the edges on both slices or the dressing will soak the bread within an hour.
- Assembly orderLettuce first, dressing on the lettuce, coconut on the dressing. Keeping the wet layers off the bread is the whole trick, and the dressing is what holds the coconut in place when the sandwich is cut.
- Cutting"Finger shaped pieces" means narrow strips; tea sandwiches of this kind were commonly trimmed of crusts, though the recipe does not say so. Three or four strips per sandwich gives the right proportions. Use a serrated knife in a sawing motion and trim after filling, not before.
- Yield and timingA standard loaf of thin-sliced bread gives roughly 40 to 50 fingers. Make them no more than an hour ahead, cover with a barely damp cloth under plastic, and refrigerate; the lettuce goes limp quickly.
Dromedary was the brand name used by the Hills Brothers Company of New York, best known for dates and for shredded coconut sold in tins and cartons, and this booklet belongs to a familiar genre: the manufacturer's recipe pamphlet, written to persuade cooks that a single pantry ingredient had far more uses than they supposed. Hence coconut in a sandwich, a savory-sweet combination that sounds odder now than it did in the early twentieth century, when afternoon tea sandwiches were often built on nuts, dates, chopped raisins and marshmallow as readily as on ham or cucumber. Shredded coconut had become cheaper and more widely available by the late nineteenth century, once mechanical shredding and packing let sellers offer it dry and shelf-stable rather than as whole nuts, and pamphlets like this one worked hard to move it out of the cake tin and onto the rest of the table.