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Ribbon Sandwiches
Cut two slices of white bread and two of brown. Butter three and spread with a thick paste made of hard-boiled egg very finely chopped and mixed with Mayonnaise dressing. Build the slices up one above the other, alternating brown and white, and placing the unbuttered slice on top. Before serving, slice down as you would a layer cake.
A tea-table sandwich built as a small loaf and cut like a cake. The whole point is contrast between the dark and light bread, so everything else serves that.
- Bread choice"Brown bread" here means an ordinary whole-wheat or graham sandwich loaf, not Boston brown bread. Buy both loaves in the same size and shape so the layers stack square, and use day-old bread, which slices cleaner and absorbs less filling.
- Slice thicknessCut about 1/4 inch thick; thicker slices make a block that falls apart when sliced down.
- Butter both facesThe recipe butters three slices, one face each. Butter every interior face instead, right to the edges. The butter is a moisture barrier between the mayonnaise filling and the crumb, and unbuttered bread will soften as the loaf stands.
- The fillingRoughly two hard-boiled eggs and 2 to 3 tablespoons of mayonnaise makes enough for three layers. Chop the egg very fine and keep the paste stiff -- a loose filling slides when you press the stack and the ribbons go crooked.
- Press and chillThis is the step the original leaves out and the one that decides the result. Wrap the assembled stack in a damp cloth or plastic, set a light weight on top, and refrigerate at least an hour. A chilled, compressed loaf cuts into clean stripes; a fresh one tears.
- Trimming and cuttingTrim all four crusts off the chilled block with a long serrated knife before slicing down into fingers about 3/4 inch wide. Wipe the blade between cuts.
- YieldOne four-slice stack trimmed and cut into 3/4-inch fingers gives only about five small sandwiches. Scale up by building several loaves rather than one tall one.
- KeepingHard-boiled egg and mayonnaise should not sit out. Assemble ahead if you like, but keep the loaf refrigerated until shortly before serving and do not leave the cut sandwiches at room temperature for more than a couple of hours.
Ribbon sandwiches belong to the era of the afternoon tea and the ladies' luncheon, when a sandwich was expected to look decorative on a plate rather than to fill anyone up. The technique is simply a loaf rebuilt from its own slices with filling as mortar, then cut across the grain of the layers so the stripes show -- the same logic that produces checkerboard and pinwheel sandwiches in books of the same period. The instruction to "slice down as you would a layer cake" borrows a cake's assembly and presentation; only the ingredients are savoury. Loose-leaf cookbooks of this kind were bound so that a housekeeper could add supplements and her own clippings, and their tea-sandwich pages tend to be short on time and temperature because the work is all in the knife.