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Sandwiches, Cucumber
IN GREDIENTS for small dish. The centre or thickest part of a moderate-sized cucumber, 4 rounds of thin white bread-and-butter, oil, vinegar and pepper. AVERAGE COST, SANDWICHES, FOIE GRAS.
Peel the cucumber and cut into slices rather thicker than for a salad, and steep these rounds for a short time in oil and vinegar. Stamp out rounds of bread-andbutter of corresponding size, and make sandwiches of the cucumber sprinkled with a litttle pepper. These sandwiches look best arranged in rings as cutlets, with garnish of cress or parsley.
SEASONABLE in summer for afternoon tea.
A tea-table sandwich that depends entirely on keeping the bread dry and the cucumber crisp. Two small technical points in the original text need translating, and one line is a printing error.
- The stray line"AVERAGE COST, SANDWICHES, FOIE GRAS" is not an ingredient. It appears to be the cost heading (left blank) run together with a neighbouring cross-reference to the foie gras sandwich entry. Ignore it.
- Butter is structuralThe bread is buttered before the cucumber goes in, and it should be soft enough to spread right to the edge. The butter is a seal against the marinade, not a flavouring, so a thin complete layer beats a thick patchy one.
- Steep brieflyThe book says only "a short time" and gives no proportions; a few minutes in a plain oil-and-vinegar dressing is enough. Left longer the slices slacken and weep, and the bread will go through.
- Drain hardLift the slices out and blot them on a cloth or kitchen paper before they touch the bread, or the dressing will soak the bread.
- Slice thickness"rather thicker than for a salad" is relative and the book gives no measure; keep the rounds thin enough to bite through the sandwich cleanly but substantial enough that one round carries the flavour.
- Stamping the breadA plain round cutter, matched to the diameter of the cucumber, cuts through two slices at once if the bread is a day old. Very fresh soft bread tears; chill it briefly or use a firm sandwich loaf.
- Arranged as cutletsThe rounds are stood on edge and overlapped in a ring round the plate, the way cutlets are dished, with cress or parsley heaped in the centre. It is a serving instruction, not a cooking one.
- Yield and timingFour rounds of bread make two small sandwiches, cut in halves if wanted — a portion for one or two at tea. Assemble no more than half an hour before serving and keep them covered with a damp cloth.
Cucumber sandwiches belong to the late-Victorian and Edwardian afternoon tea, a meal built on things that could be eaten standing up, in gloves, without a knife. Their reputation for gentility is partly economic: through the nineteenth century good cucumbers in Britain were grown under glass in heated frames, which made an out-of-season cucumber a luxury and an in-season one, as the entry's "seasonable in summer" notes, a cheap pleasure. Beeton's version dresses the slices in oil and vinegar first rather than simply salting them han to to the plain buttered-bread-and-cucumber that later became the standard. The instruction to arrange them "in rings as cutlets" is a reminder that in this period the look of a dish on the plate was taught as carefully as its making, and that the vocabulary of the dinner table was borrowed freely for the tea tray.