Egg Sandwiches
Powder and rub to a paste the hard boiled yolks of eight eggs, add two tablespoonfuls of melted butter, a saltspoonful of salt and a dash of cayenne. Mix, and spread on slices of buttered bread, place the slices together, trim off the crusts and cut into neat shapes.
A tea-sandwich filling of the plainest kind, and it stands or falls on the texture of the yolk paste. Work it until it is genuinely smooth or the sandwiches will be crumbly and dry.
- SaltspoonfulA saltspoon is a quarter of a teaspoon. With eight yolks and two tablespoons of butter that is a light hand; taste and adjust.
- Eight yolks, no whitesOnly the yolks go in, which leaves eight cooked whites over. Chop them into a salad or a cream sauce rather than discarding them.
- Hard boilingCover the eggs with cold water, bring to a boil, cover and leave off the heat 10-12 minutes, then cool in cold water. The green-grey ring around an overcooked yolk carries a sulphurous flavour that shows up plainly in a filling this bare.
- Melted butter, used warmRub the melted butter into the warm sieved yolks so it emulsifies rather than setting in flecks. If it stiffens before you finish, warm the bowl briefly. Pushing the yolks through a fine sieve gives a better paste than mashing with a fork.
- ConsistencyTwo tablespoons of butter to eight yolks makes a stiff paste that is meant to be spread thinly on already-buttered bread. If it fights the bread, loosen it with a teaspoon or two of cream.
- The breadThin-sliced, close-crumbed white bread a day old cuts cleanly and takes butter without tearing. Butter the bread to the edges: it seals the crumb and keeps the filling from soaking in.
- Cutting and holdingTrim the crusts after assembling, not before, and press the sandwiches lightly under a board first. Cover with a damp cloth if they must wait, and keep them cold; egg filling should not sit out on a hot day, which is the weather this book was written for.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. The filling is enough for roughly four to eight sandwiches depending on how thickly it is spread, each cut into three or four fingers or triangles.
Hot Weather Dishes belongs to a late nineteenth-century genre of small, seasonal cookbooks aimed at households with no refrigeration and a cook who did not want to light the range in July. Sandwiches like this one earn their place because the only heat required is a pot of boiling water, and because they travel: similar fillings appear in period books under picnic, luncheon and afternoon-tea headings. The tea sandwich itself — crustless, thin, cut into fingers or fancy shapes — is generally traced to the English fashion for afternoon tea that spread through American middle-class entertaining after mid-century, and cookery writers of the 1880s and 1890s produced many variations on the theme, with anchovy, ham, watercress and pounded chicken alongside egg.