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Egg Sandwiches
Mix together twelve sweet pickles chopped fine, 6 hard boiled eggs, (chopped), 3 T melted butter, 4 t salt and a dash of white pepper.
A church-supper sandwich filling of the sort meant to be mixed in a bowl and spread on thin white bread for a crowd. Two things need attention: the salt, and the fact that there is no binder.
- The salt is almost certainly a misprintThe salt looks like an error -- four teaspoons against six eggs is far more than the mixture will carry, and sweet pickles are already salted. Start with 1/2 teaspoon, taste, and adjust.
- Sweet picklesMost likely small sweet cucumber pickles, gherkins or what a label would now call sweet midgets, though the recipe does not specify. Twelve of that size come to roughly 3/4 cup once chopped. Drain the chopped pickle well or the filling will weep into the bread.
- AbbreviationsT is a tablespoon, t a teaspoon, so 3 T butter is 3 tablespoons.
- Melted butter as the binderButter is the only thing holding this together, and it firms up as it chills, so the filling spreads best while still slightly warm. If you want something that holds at room temperature, mayonnaise or a mix of the two is the usual substitution.
- Chop, do not mashThe recipe specifies chopped eggs, and they are meant to stay in distinct pieces against the pickle. Chop with a knife rather than working them smooth.
- YieldAbout 2 cups, enough for 10 to 12 sandwiches cut in halves or quarters. It keeps two days covered in the refrigerator, no longer.
Church fundraising cookbooks are thick with sandwich chapters, and this is why: the church supper, the ladies' aid tea and the missionary-society reception all needed food that could be assembled ahead, cut small, and eaten standing up. Egg and pickle was among the cheapest of the respectable fillings — eggs from the yard, pickles from the summer's canning, butter to bind. The sweet-pickle-and-egg pairing survives almost unchanged in modern deviled egg and egg salad recipes, where the sweetness and acid still do the work of cutting the richness of the yolk. In books of that kind the measurements are often as loose — or as mistyped — as whatever the contributor had scribbled on a card.