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Toasted Cucumber Sandwiches
1 cucumber 1 tablespoon lemon juice 3 drops onion juice Bread sliced 1/4 inch thick 1/3 cup butter 1/4 teaspoon salt Shake of cayenne Peel the cucumber and slice 1/4 inch thick. Drop into ice water. Cream butter with lemon, onion juice and seasonings and spread bread. Dry the cucumber on a towel. Place a slice of cucumber on the bread, cover and cut, with sharp cutter, the same size as the cucumber. Place in ice box to chill thoroughly. When ready to serve, toast quickly on each side and serve immediately. The contrast of the hot toast and the icy cucumber is the success of this sandwich.
A tea-table sandwich built on temperature contrast: chilled cucumber inside bread browned fast under high heat. The whole point collapses if the cucumber warms through.
- The hingeToast quickly and hard so the bread colours before the cucumber loses its chill. A very hot broiler, a dry cast-iron pan, or a sandwich press preheated to its highest setting for well under a minute a side. Slow toasting gives you a warm, watery sandwich.
- Dry the cucumber properlyAfter the ice water, blot both faces on a towel and press lightly. Any surface water steams into the bread and the round goes soggy in the pan.
- Onion juiceThree drops means juice pressed from a cut onion, not chopped onion. Scrape a cut face with a spoon or grate a little on a microplane and use the liquid that collects.
- Butter quantityA third cup is about 5 tablespoons or 75 g, softened, not melted. That is generous, and it doubles as the seal against the bread absorbing cucumber moisture.
- Cutting to sizeCut the sandwich rounds with a plain cutter roughly the diameter of your cucumber, about 1 1/2 to 2 inches. Cut after assembling, as written, so the edges seal together.
- Chilling"Ice box" is the period term for the ice-cooled cabinet; a refrigerator is the modern equivalent. The recipe says only "chill thoroughly" and gives no time, so judge it by the butter firming and the cucumber going genuinely cold; cover loosely if holding, or the bread dries at the edges.
- Bread choiceA close-crumbed white sandwich loaf cut 1/4 inch takes the cutter cleanly. Open, airy artisan bread tears and lets moisture through.
- YieldDepending on its length, one medium cucumber sliced at 1/4 inch gives somewhere around two dozen or more usable rounds, and so that many small sandwiches. Toast in batches and send them out as they come off the heat.
Cucumber sandwiches came into American entertaining from the English tea table, where thin bread and butter with cucumber was a familiar light refreshment by the later nineteenth century. The toasted version here is a variation on that convention, and the closing note about "the contrast of the hot toast and the icy cucumber" is the kind of effect prized in early twentieth-century hostess writing on small savouries -- though no date or source is given on the page itself. The reliance on lemon and a few drops of onion juice rather than herbs or mayonnaise keeps the filling pale and sharp.