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Bread and Butter Sandwiches
Cut bread in thin slices; remove crusts; spread with creamed butter; put two slices together; cut in desired shapes. Arrange on fancy plate.
Barely a recipe by modern standards, but the technique carries the whole thing: the butter must be soft enough to spread without tearing the crumb, and the bread firm enough to take a thin slice.
- Creamed butterNot melted or clarified — butter beaten alone until pale and light, the way you would cream it for a cake. At cool room temperature it spreads over thin bread in a film without dragging holes in it.
- The breadA close-grained white sandwich loaf a day old slices far thinner than fresh bread. A fresh loaf will compress and tear; chilling it briefly firms it enough to cut.
- Cut shapes lastAssemble the whole slice, then cut. Cutting rounds or diamonds first and buttering afterward wastes butter and gives ragged edges. A sharp thin-bladed knife or a plain cutter gives the cleanest line.
- Holding themThese dry out within the hour. Cover with a barely damp cloth or wrap closely and hold in the refrigerator, then bring back to cool room temperature before serving.
- YieldA standard sandwich loaf gives roughly 20 slices, so about 10 whole sandwiches — 30 to 40 small shapes, enough for a table of eight to ten alongside a chafing dish.
Lowney's Cook Book (1907) was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston to sell chocolate, but like many manufacturer cookbooks of the period it aimed to be a complete household manual, which may be why something as elementary as buttered bread earns an entry. It sits among the book's chafing dish material: the chafing dish supper was popular in American middle-class entertaining around 1900, a way of cooking creamed oysters, rarebits and lobster Newburg at the table after the theatre or during an evening at home, without servants. Those dishes are all sauce, and they needed something plain to carry them — hence thin bread and butter, cut in fancy shapes, ranged on a plate within reach. The instruction to cut "in desired shapes" is of a piece with the ribbon sandwiches and pinwheels in the tea-table books of the following two decades.