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Savoy Sandwich
4 tablespoons butter 1 teaspoon lemon juice 1 teaspoon chopped onion 2 tablespoons water cress 6 stuffed olives 1 tablespoon capers Cream the butter, add the lemon juice and all the other ingredients finely minced. Spread between thinly sliced rye bread.
A compound butter spread rather than a filled sandwich, built on the same logic as a hotel savoury butter: fat carries the acid and the salt from the olives and capers.
- Butter first, and softFour tablespoons is half a stick. Let it come fully to room temperature and cream it until it looks pale and aerated before anything else goes in, or the lemon juice will bead out instead of emulsifying.
- Add the juice slowlyA teaspoon of lemon juice will incorporate more evenly if it goes in a few drops at a time rather than all at once into cold butter.
- Mince genuinely fineThe instruction "finely minced" is the hinge here. Coarse olive or caper pieces tear thin rye when you spread it; chop everything to near-paste on a board, or pulse briefly in a small processor.
- Water cressThe two tablespoons is probably best read as chopped leaves rather than whole sprigs. Use watercress leaves only and pat them dry, since wet greens will thin the butter.
- Stuffed olivesMost likely green olives stuffed with pimiento, though anchovy- and almond-stuffed olives were also sold. Six is roughly a tablespoon chopped; drain and blot them, and hold back on any added salt.
- CapersDrain and rinse brined capers, or the spread turns sharp and wet. Salt-packed capers should be soaked and dried first.
- Rest before spreadingHalf an hour in the refrigerator lets the onion and caper flavour move into the fat and firms the butter enough to spread cleanly on thin slices.
- YieldAbout half a cup of spread, enough for six to eight small sandwiches cut into fingers or triangles. It keeps three or four days covered in the refrigerator.
Savoury butters like this one belong to the hotel and club kitchens of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the name Savoy may point at that world, whether or not the recipe ever passed through the London or New York hotels of that name. Creamed butters worked with anchovy, herbs, olives or capers were part of the professional repertoire, partly for finishing grilled meat and partly for the tea and reception sandwich, which had to be thin, tidy and able to sit on a tray without going limp. Rye bread rather than white marks it as the sharper end of that repertoire rather than the cucumber-and-butter end. The appeal of a single bowl of worked butter was that it could stand in for a filling and be made ahead.