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Lettuce Sandwiches
Spread bread and butter sandwiches with a layer of cream dressing and a layer of crisp lettuce leaves, washed and dried thoroughly. Cress also may be used. Trim the edges with a sharp knife.
A two-minute assembly job whose success rests entirely on dry leaves and a dressing thick enough to sit still. Nothing here needs heat.
- Cream dressingIn books of this era the term usually covers a cooked or "boiled" dressing thickened with egg and flour and finished with cream, though it can also mean little more than cream sharpened with vinegar or lemon; it is unlikely to mean bottled mayonnaise. Either works; what matters is that it be thick, not pourable, or the bread turns to paste.
- Dry the lettuce properlyThis is the hinge of the recipe. A salad spinner followed by a few minutes flat on a towel is not excessive — any water clinging to the ribs will bleed into the crumb within minutes.
- BreadUse a close-grained white or wheat sandwich loaf, cut thin. Open, airy artisan crumb tears under a dressing and lets leaves slide.
- Butter both slicesThe recipe takes bread-and-butter sandwiches as its starting point without specifying how they are buttered; buttering both slices is functional, since a continuous film of soft butter waterproofs the crumb against the dressing.
- CressThe suggested substitute may be garden or land cress, sold as a punnet of fine seedlings, or watercress leaves stripped from their coarse stems; either gives a peppery result, watercress the sharper of the two.
- Trimming the edges'Trim the edges' generally meant cutting away the crusts, common practice for thin tea sandwiches. Use a sharp, thin knife after assembly, one stroke per side, so the layers are sealed rather than dragged.
- Yield and holdingFigure two slices of bread and one or two leaves per sandwich, cut into halves, triangles or fingers. Assemble no more than an hour ahead and keep them under a damp cloth in the refrigerator; they do not survive to the next day.
Lettuce sandwiches belong to the era when the thin, crustless tea sandwich was a fixture of afternoon entertaining, and sandwiches were the hardest part of a menu to build without ham, tongue or potted meat. Vegetarian cookery in English-language print grew steadily from the mid-nineteenth century onward, driven partly by health-reform movements and partly, during and after the First World War, by meat economy campaigns. The insistence on trimming the edges with a sharp knife is a period marker in itself — a crust left on a tea sandwich may well have read as careless, and instructions of this kind were presumably written for households where such things were noticed.