Egg Sandwiches
Mix hard-boiled egg, finely chopped, with Mayonnaise dressing and spread on slices of buttered bread, preferably graham. Chopped olives may be added to the egg mixture if desired.
A two-line filling recipe of the kind that assumes the cook already has a bowl of mayonnaise standing in the icebox. The only real variables are the texture of the egg and how wet you make the mixture.
- Hard-boiled, not overboiledTwelve minutes in barely simmering water, then straight into cold water, gives a set yolk without the grey-green ring and sulfurous smell that comes of a hard boil. Chop yolk and white together so the yolk binds the mixture.
- Mayonnaise dressingIn this period the term would most often have meant a hand-beaten oil-and-egg-yolk emulsion made at home. Jarred mayonnaise works and is more stable; if you make your own and plan to keep the sandwiches more than an hour, use pasteurized eggs and hold everything cold.
- How much dressingNo proportion is given. Start with about 1 tablespoon mayonnaise per chopped egg and add more only until the mixture holds together — a loose filling soaks through the bread within minutes.
- Graham breadGraham flour is coarsely ground whole wheat, including the bran and germ. A dense whole-wheat sandwich loaf is the nearest substitute; the nutty flavor sets off the bland egg.
- Butter both slicesNot a flourish. The butter film is what keeps the mayonnaise from wetting the crumb, which matters if the sandwiches are made ahead for tea or a lunch basket.
- OlivesUse pitted green olives in brine, chopped fine and blotted dry, or the brine will thin the filling. Two or three per egg is plenty; more and the salt overwhelms.
- YieldThree hard-boiled eggs fill about four sandwiches, or sixteen small tea sandwiches with the crusts cut off. Season with salt and pepper — the original leaves it unsaid, and unseasoned egg tastes flat.
Egg sandwiches turn up in a great many American cookbooks of the 1900s and 1910s, and their sudden ubiquity has as much to do with mayonnaise as with eggs: bottled commercial mayonnaise seems to have reached American groceries somewhere around 1907 to 1912, depending on the maker, and before that every cook who wanted a bound salad filling beat her own. The preference for graham bread points to the other current running through these books — the whole-grain enthusiasm descended from Sylvester Graham's dietary reform of the earlier nineteenth century, by then softened from a moral crusade into a general sense that brown bread was the wholesome choice for luncheons and children's teas. That this appears under "Cakes" seems to be a quirk of the loose-leaf format.