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Club Sandwiches
Marinate crisp lettuce leaves. Butter thin slices of bread; arrange on bread one lettuce leaf, on leaf a thin slice of tongue spread with mayonnaise, on top of this a slice of tomato spread with mayonnaise, and cover with a thin slice of buttered bread.
A short entry that assumes you already know what a club sandwich is; the only real technique in it is the marinating of the lettuce, which is easy to skip and shouldn't be.
- "Marinate" the lettuceIn period usage this means tossing the leaves briefly in French dressing — oil, vinegar, salt, pepper — and letting them drain, not a long soak. Do it just before assembling, or the leaves wilt and soak the bread.
- TongueCooked, pressed beef tongue, a common cold meat in this period and still available at good butchers and many Latin and Eastern European markets. Sliced ham, corned beef or roast beef will stand in, though the flavour changes.
- BreadThe recipe specifies only 'thin slices,' cut by hand from the loaf. Cut white or firm sandwich bread thin yourself if your loaf is thick; the sandwich is built on the filling, not the bread. No toasting is mentioned, unlike the toasted club that later became standard.
- MayonnaiseTraditional homemade mayonnaise here uses raw yolk. Use pasteurised eggs or commercial mayonnaise if serving to anyone elderly, pregnant, very young or immunocompromised.
- The tomatoSalt the slices lightly and let them drain on a towel for a few minutes before laying them in. Untreated tomato slices release enough liquid to break down the bottom slice of bread within minutes.
- Order of assemblyThe recipe puts the lettuce directly on the buttered bread, with the tomato above the tongue; butter and leaf together will help keep the tomato's juice off the crumb. Keep that sequence even if you swap the meat.
- Yield and servingThe recipe is written as a method rather than for a fixed number; scale by the person. Trim the crusts and cut into triangles or fingers if serving alongside a salad.
The club sandwich surfaced in American clubhouse and hotel dining rooms in the 1890s, its name generally traced to those clubs rather than to any single inventor, and by the time Lowney's Cook Book appeared it was familiar enough to need only a sentence of description. Note what is absent: no toast, no bacon, no third slice of bread, no chicken hink think of as definitive was one variant among many. This one is dressed lettuce and tomato with mayonnaise, the tongue functioning much as it did on a cold supper platter. Pressed tongue was an unremarkable staple of the American larder in this period, slicing thinly and cleanly.