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Bread and Butter Sandwiches
Butter bread slightly, cut very thin and put the slices together. The bread should be a day old and the butter should be creamed. It is better to butter the bread before it is cut. Remove the crusts.
A method rather than a formula, and the method is the whole point: everything here exists to get slices thin enough to be delicate without tearing.
- Butter the loaf, not the sliceThe hinge of the recipe. Spread the cut face of the loaf, then cut that buttered face away with a long thin knife. A slice too thin to hold up to a spreading knife will hold up perfectly well if the butter is already on it.
- Creamed butterThis means butter beaten soft with a spoon or paddle until it spreads like cream, not melted. Let it soften at room temperature first; melted butter soaks into the crumb and makes the bread greasy.
- Day-old breadFresh bread compresses under the knife and shreds. A close-grained white sandwich loaf a day old cuts cleanly. An open, holey artisan crumb will not give you the tidy sealed surface this style wants.
- How thin is very thinThe recipe gives no measure; thin enough to be flexible is the aim. A serrated bread knife drawn in long strokes, or a very sharp thin-bladed knife, works better than pressing down.
- CrustsRemove them after the sandwich is assembled, cutting through both slices at once so the edges line up. Then cut into fingers or triangles.
- Keeping themAssembled sandwiches dry out fast at this thickness. Cover with a barely damp cloth, then plastic wrap, and refrigerate no more than a few hours; bring back to cool room temperature before serving.
- YieldThe original gives none, and none can be derived from the text; how many sandwiches a loaf gives depends entirely on how thin the slices are cut and how the trimmed sandwiches are divided.
Bread and butter cut thin and crustless is the plainest member of the English tea-table family, and it survived into American cookbooks as the baseline against which fancier sandwiches were measured. Recipes like this one insist that the form itself is worth having without the meat, and that its quality lies in technique — the age of the loaf, the temperature of the butter, the order in which the knife is used — rather than in the filling. The practice of buttering the loaf before slicing is old kitchen craft, generally passed down through household manuals rather than invented by any one writer, and it is a reliable way to produce a slice this thin by hand.