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Japan Sandwiches
Chop raw oysters fine; season with pepper, salt and horseradish. Spread a little on a thin slice of buttered bread; add a crisp lettuce leaf and a second slice of bread.
A filling rather than a recipe in the usual sense: three lines, no quantities, no yield. Everything depends on the oysters and on keeping the bread dry.
- Drain the oysters firstThis is the hinge. Chopped raw oysters release a great deal of liquor, and if it goes onto the bread the sandwich collapses within minutes. Chop on a board, tip into a sieve, and let the mince drain for several minutes before seasoning.
- QuantitiesNone are given. Reckon on about a dozen shucked oysters, chopped, to fill six thin sandwiches, with roughly a teaspoon of horseradish and a good pinch of salt for the batch. Season after draining, not before.
- HorseradishThis may have meant freshly grated root, or root grated into a little vinegar, though bottled prepared horseradish was already on sale by this date. Jarred prepared horseradish works, but it is wetter and sharper; use less and squeeze it in a paper towel first. Creamed horseradish will thin the filling.
- Raw shellfishThe oysters are never cooked. Buy from a source that sells them for raw consumption, use them the day you buy them, keep the chopped mince covered over ice, and assemble the sandwiches within an hour of serving. Anyone pregnant, immunocompromised, or with liver disease should not eat raw oysters at all.
- The breadSlice thin from a close-textured white sandwich loaf, butter the slices right to the edge — the butter is a moisture barrier as much as a flavouring — and trim the crusts after filling, not before.
- The lettuce"Crisp" suggests a heart leaf of a crisphead lettuce or a romaine rib. Dry it thoroughly; wet lettuce undoes the buttering.
- ServingCut in halves or fingers and serve at once, cold. These do not hold, and they cannot be made ahead and wrapped.
- Filed under CakesThe section heading sits oddly with the recipe; the loose-leaf format, in which pages could be moved between binder tabs, may explain it. Read it as a tea-table or luncheon sandwich.
Mrs. Fryer's book belongs to the loose-leaf era of American cookery publishing in the early twentieth century, when books were sold as punched sheets in a binder so a housekeeper could add her own pages and rearrange the sections. Fancy sandwiches were then a whole genre in themselves, built for card parties, church suppers and afternoon receptions, and cookbooks of the period list dozens under invented names. The names rarely indicate any connection to the place; "Japan" and "Japanese" were fashionable decorative labels in American entertaining, and are generally taken to signal novelty or daintiness rather than provenance. What is genuinely of its time is the oyster itself: cheap, and used with a freedom that reads as luxurious now.