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Club Sandwich
Toast fresh bread. Spread one slice with butter, add lettuce leaf, crisp bacon and white chicken meat. Add another slice of buttered toast,.. and on it place sliced tomatoes, covered with mayonnaise dressing. Com-- plete the sandwich with another piece of toast. Serve at once.
A complete club sandwich in five sentences, with the layering order that most modern versions still follow. The only real work is getting all the components ready at once.
- Toast temperature is the hingeToast temperature -- The recipe says to toast fresh bread and to "serve at once," so the sandwich is plainly meant to be eaten straight after assembly. Toast that has cooled goes leathery and the mayonnaise slides; toast straight off the heat will wilt the lettuce, so let it stand a moment first.
- "White chicken meat"Breast meat, sliced thin. The recipe does not say how it was cooked or whether it is warm or cold; leftovers from a boiled or roast bird would be one plausible source, and a rotisserie bird carved thin does the same job.
- Mayonnaise dressingIn a cookbook of this period the term could mean either a homemade emulsified mayonnaise or a cooked "boiled" dressing, often thinner and sharper than modern jarred mayonnaise. Commercial mayonnaise is a fair substitute; thin it with a spoonful of lemon juice if you want the older character.
- Which side gets the butterThe recipe just says "buttered toast" without saying which face; butter both sides of the middle slice. It acts as a moisture barrier between the toast and the sliced tomato.
- Salt the tomatoThe recipe mentions no seasoning at all. Sliced tomato under mayonnaise with no salt tastes flat, and a little salt applied a minute ahead also draws off water that would otherwise soak the toast.
- Cutting and holding it togetherThe recipe gives no instruction for cutting or securing it. Cutting corner to corner into quarters and pinning each with a cocktail pick is the usual modern way to keep a three-decker in shape.
- YieldOne sandwich, one person, as written. Scale by the diner rather than by the batch, since it does not stand.
The club sandwich turns up on American hotel and clubhouse menus by the late 1880s and 1890s and was thoroughly familiar by the time small-town church committees were collecting recipes for it. Its origin is traditional rather than documented: it is variously traced to gentlemen's clubs in New York and to the dining cars and resort hotels of the same era, and no single claim is well supported. What is clear is why it reached a community fundraising cookbook at all, which is that the three-decker toast sandwich was fashionable restaurant food, and such collections are often said to have brought hotel dishes within reach of a household kitchen. The recipe's confidence that the reader knows what mayonnaise dressing is says as much about the era as the sandwich does.