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Cucumber Sandwiches
Slice one cucumber; marinate with French dressing.
Sprinkle thin slices of white bread with cayenne; spread with marinated cucumbers, and cover with white bread cut in thin slices.
A three-line recipe that depends entirely on moisture control. The instruction that matters is not in the original: drain and blot the cucumbers before they touch the bread.
- French dressing, 1907 senseNot the sweet orange bottled dressing but a plain vinaigrette: oil and vinegar in the region of two to four parts oil to one part vinegar, with salt and pepper. Whisk about 3 tablespoons oil with 1 tablespoon vinegar for one cucumber.
- Marinate, then dryTwenty to thirty minutes in the dressing is enough. Lift the slices out, lay them on a towel and press gently — dressing-wet cucumber will soak through thin bread within minutes and the sandwich collapses.
- Salting helpsToss the sliced cucumber with a little salt for 15 minutes and drain before dressing it. This draws out water that would otherwise end up in the bread.
- The cucumber itselfCucumbers of the period were often thicker-skinned and seedier than modern ones, and many cooks may have peeled and seeded them, though this recipe says neither. An English or Persian cucumber needs neither; slice it as thin as you can manage, ideally on a mandoline.
- CayenneA sprinkle means a sprinkle — an eighth of a teaspoon across four slices of bread. It is there as heat against the cucumber's blandness, not as a flavor of its own. A light film of softened butter on the bread first both carries the cayenne and waterproofs the crumb.
- The bread"White bread cut in thin slices" means a fine-grained sandwich loaf, day-old so it slices cleanly at about 1/4 inch. Trim the crusts after assembling, then cut into fingers or triangles.
- Yield and timingOne cucumber fills about four sandwiches, or 12 to 16 tea-sized pieces. Assemble within an hour of serving; cover with a damp cloth and refrigerate if holding, and do not make them the night before.
Cucumber sandwiches belong to the English afternoon tea table of the later nineteenth century, where their appeal is often said to have been partly economic display: cucumbers meant a greenhouse or a good market. Lowney's Cook Book (1907), written by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston — a chocolate manufacturer that issued the book largely to promote its cocoa — gives a version of the dish. The cayenne is characteristic of American cookbooks of the period, which used it freely as a general sharpener.