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Cucumber Sandwiches
Slices of cucumber Grated cheese Thin bread and butter Pepper, salt Take some thin slices of bread and butter. Sprinkle with grated cheese, and dust a very little pepper over them. Lay very thinly sliced cucumber over this, and cover them with more bread and butter; press them slightly together, and cut off the crust. Cut into shapes, and serve on a doily.
A closed sandwich rather than the more familiar open cucumber round, with grated cheese standing in for the usual smear of mayonnaise. Almost everything hinges on how thin the cucumber is and how dry you keep it.
- Salt the cucumber firstCut the cucumber as thin as you can manage — a mandoline or the coarse side of a box grater's slicing blade is ideal — then salt it lightly and leave it in a colander for 15 to 20 minutes, patting dry before use. Cucumber is around 95 per cent water, and the original's instruction to press the sandwiches together will drive that water straight into the bread if you skip this. Adjust the seasoning salt accordingly.
- "Thin bread and butter"This means bread already spread with butter before assembly, and the butter is structural, not decorative. Use it soft and take it right to the edges: it waterproofs the crumb against the cucumber.
- The cheeseThe recipe names none; a firm English cheese such as Cheddar or Cheshire would suit. Any dry, sharp hard cheese works; avoid pre-shredded cheese, which is coated in starch and will taste chalky in something uncooked.
- Cut into shapesSquares, triangles or fingers, cut with a long thin knife after the crusts come off. Cutting before the sandwich has been pressed and rested tends to make the layers slide apart.
- TimingThese are best assembled no more than an hour ahead and kept covered with a damp cloth in the refrigerator. Left overnight the bread goes grey and limp regardless of how well the cucumber was drained.
- YieldA loaf-worth is not specified. Reckon roughly on one medium cucumber and about 3 oz of cheese for a dozen slices of bread, giving 24 to 36 small pieces — enough for a tea table of six.
- Serve on a doilyA paper or lace doily was standard tea-table presentation, and will also take up any weeping from the filling. A folded napkin on the plate does the same job if you want it.
Cucumber sandwiches belong to the late Victorian and Edwardian tea table, where their appeal was partly that they were difficult: cucumbers were glasshouse produce, needing heat and gardeners' attention out of season, so serving them thin and cold signalled a household with resources and nothing urgent to do. Their reputation as the emblem of leisured triviality was fixed by Wilde in The Importance of Being Earnest in 1895, where Algernon eats the lot before Lady Bracknell arrives. This version, from a meatless cookery book, shows why such a sandwich earned a place in vegetarian collections of the period: the grated cheese adds the protein and savour that in a conventional tea would have come from potted meat or ham paste, and books of this kind were often as much about respectable entertaining without flesh as about everyday dinners.