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Toasted Sandwiches
Butter thin slices of bread as if preparing sandwiches and put them together. Trim off the crusts. Lay them in a wire broiler and hold over a clear fire till very delicately browned. Serve hot .
A one-line method from the era of open coal and wood fires, and the ancestor of every griddled sandwich since. The instructions assume equipment and heat sources that need translating.
- The wire broilerA hinged wire basket with a long handle, held by hand over live coals so both sides could be turned without touching the food. A grill basket over a gas flame does the same job; failing that, a dry heavy skillet or a griddle over medium heat, pressed lightly with a spatula.
- "A clear fire"Coals burned down past the smoking stage, with no flame and no soot to taint the bread. On a modern stove that suggests medium heat rather than high, so the bread colours without blackening before the butter inside has melted.
- Butter on the outside tooThe original butters the bread as for a cold sandwich, so the butter is inside and the outer faces are dry. Dry faces toast rather than fry, which is why the result is described as delicately browned. Buttering the outer faces instead gives the darker, crisper modern grilled sandwich.
- There is no fillingThe text specifies only buttered bread, so this reads as a base method to which a filling could be added. Anything moist should be kept thin, and anything greasy will run out as the butter melts.
- Trim the crusts first, as writtenThe recipe trims before broiling. Crusts sit proud of the crumb and colour ahead of it over direct heat, and trimmed sandwiches were in any case the convention of the period.
- Bread"thin slices" of a firm household loaf. Modern soft sandwich bread is usually cut thicker and is sweeter, so it tends to colour sooner and less evenly than a close-grained loaf.
- Yield and servingThe recipe says only "serve hot", and toasted sandwiches do not hold well once off the fire. No quantity or cutting is specified.
Toasting bread at the fire in a hinged wire holder long predates the sandwich itself, and the two practices met in nineteenth-century tea and supper cookery, where a plate of something hot was expected alongside cold dishes. Recipes of this period are written for a range with an open grate or for the coals themselves, so "hold over a clear fire" is an instruction about smoke and flame as much as heat: soot and resinous flare-up were the practical enemies of anything toasted, and the direction to wait for a clear fire recurs throughout Victorian and Edwardian cookbooks. The electric sandwich press and the enclosed toaster spread gradually through American kitchens from the 1910s onward, and the wire broiler's decline is usually attributed as much to the closed cooking range as to electrical appliances, but the method survives in the skillet-toasted sandwich.