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Lettuce and Cream-Cheese Sandwiches
Mix equal quantities of chopped lettuce and cream cheese; add salt and spread on thin slices of buttered bread.
A one-line sandwich filling from the era of the afternoon tea tray. The only real decisions are what cheese is meant and how to keep the bread from going limp.
- "Cream cheese"In American books of this period the term covers both the soft fresh curd cheese sold in blocks and, in some households, a homemade drained cheese from soured cream or milk. Either works; a block-style cream cheese wants softening at room temperature or a spoonful of cream beaten in so it will spread on thin bread without tearing it.
- Equal quantitiesAlmost certainly by volume rather than weight, as the book gives no unit. Chopped lettuce packs loosely, so equal cups will tend toward a filling that is mostly cheese with lettuce through it, which is what holds together on the bread.
- Dry the lettuceThe hinge of the whole thing. Wash and dry the leaves thoroughly before chopping, or the water they release will thin the cheese and soak the bread within the hour. Crisp inner leaves of a head lettuce chop more cleanly than loose-leaf types.
- Butter first, and to the edgesThe butter is not just flavour; it seals the crumb against moisture from the filling. Have it soft enough to spread in a thin, complete layer.
- Thin slicesA firm day-old sandwich loaf cuts thinner than fresh bread. For tea sandwiches, trim the crusts after filling and cutting, not before, and press lightly so the layers set.
- SeasoningSalt alone is the original. A grind of pepper, a little lemon juice, or a spoonful of chopped chives are all in keeping if the cheese tastes flat.
- Yield and holdingAbout a cup of filling covers six to eight sandwiches cut into quarters. Assemble no more than an hour or two ahead and keep them covered with a barely damp cloth in the refrigerator.
Filed here under Cakes, since tea-table pages tended to drift together: sandwiches, small cakes and anything else that went out on a tray at four o'clock. Thin buttered bread with a soft filling was the defining form of the American and British tea sandwich from the late nineteenth century onward, and cream cheese was the workhorse of the genre because it spread without crumbling and carried whatever was chopped into it, from olives to nuts to watercress. Commercially made fresh cream cheese was widely available in the United States by the 1880s and 1890s.