Home › Salads › Tomato and Horse-radish Sandwiches
Tomato and Horse-radish Sandwiches
Mix one quarter cup mayonnaise with one quarter cup horse-radish. Sprinkle slices of tomato with salt. Spread thin slices of bread with horse-radish mixture, and put sliced tomato between.
A three-ingredient tea sandwich that lives or dies on moisture control. Everything below is about keeping the bread from turning to paste.
- Salt the tomatoes, then drain themThe original salts the slices but does not say to wait. Lay them on a rack or paper towels for 15-20 minutes after salting and blot the cut faces dry; the salt pulls out a surprising amount of liquid that would otherwise soak straight through the bread.
- Horse-radishThe book gives no form, so this could be freshly grated root, root packed in vinegar, or the bottled prepared horseradish already on sale by this date. Modern bottled prepared horseradish tends to be wet and sharp; drain it in a fine sieve, pressing gently, before stirring it into the mayonnaise, or use about 3 tablespoons drained horseradish plus a spoonful of its liquid to taste.
- A quarter cup of each is a lot of heatEqual parts horseradish and mayonnaise makes an aggressive spread by current tastes. Start at half that ratio and work up if you like the burn.
- Spread edge to edgeThe mayonnaise layer is the waterproofing. Take it right to the crust line on both slices, not just the centre, or the corners go soggy first.
- Bread"Thin slices" is not defined in the book; period sandwich instructions generally just say as thin as the loaf will allow, which in practice is somewhere around an eighth of an inch. A day-old close-crumbed loaf slices thinner and holds up better than fresh bakery bread.
- Yield and timingThe half cup or so of spread the recipe makes covers roughly 8 slices, or 4 sandwiches cut into 8-16 small pieces. Assemble no more than 30 minutes before serving; these do not keep and should not be refrigerated overnight.
- TrimmingThe recipe does not mention crusts, though trimmed bread was common for sandwiches served at tea or with a salad course. If you want them off, cut them after assembly with a long thin knife rather than dragging at the layers.
Lowney's Cook Book was written by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and like most house cookbooks of its era it ranged far beyond the product it was meant to sell -- hence a full salad chapter with sandwiches tucked into it. Placing sandwiches among the salads was a common editorial habit in cookbooks of the period, when thin, crustless, filled bread was often understood as part of the light luncheon or afternoon-tea course rather than as a meal in itself. Horseradish was a kitchen-garden staple long before it was a jarred condiment, and mixing the grated root into mayonnaise or whipped cream was one of the common American ways to serve it; the tomato pairing reflects the period's growing comfort with the raw tomato, which had only become an unremarkable salad vegetable in the decades just before this book appeared.