Sandwiches
1/4 cup grated cheese 1/4 teaspoon salt 1/4 teaspoon paprika 1/4 teaspoon mustard 1 teaspoon anchovy paste 1 tablespoon chopped olives 1 teaspoon lemon juice 2 tablespoons butter Mix the ingredients to a cream and spread between thin slices of graham or white bread.
A compound butter dressed up as a sandwich filling. Everything depends on getting the butter soft enough to absorb the other ingredients without melting.
- Soften, don't meltLeave the butter at room temperature until it dents easily under a finger, then work the additions in with a fork or small spatula. Melted butter will separate and weep into the bread instead of holding the cheese and olives in suspension.
- The mustard is dryThe mustard is probably dry -- an unqualified "mustard" measured by the quarter teaspoon in a book of this period most likely means powdered mustard rather than prepared. If you substitute a wet prepared mustard you will need appreciably more, and can expect a looser, more vinegary spread.
- Which cheese"grated cheese" is unspecified, but the method suggests a firm dry cheese that grates finely: aged cheddar, or a dry Parmesan-style cheese. Anything young and moist will sit in wet shreds rather than creaming into the butter.
- Hold back the saltA quarter teaspoon of salt on top of anchovy paste, olives and aged cheese is a great deal by current palates. Mix everything else first, taste, and add salt only if it needs it.
- Anchovy pasteStill sold in tubes, and close enough to the older product to be used straight across, though salt levels vary by brand. A teaspoon is enough to read as savoury depth rather than fish; mashed anchovy fillets work if you have no paste.
- Graham breadGraham bread is a coarse whole-wheat loaf, slightly sweet, made from unsifted flour. Any dense whole-wheat sandwich bread stands in for it, sliced thin as the recipe insists.
- Yield and keepingThe quantities give roughly a third of a cup of spread, enough for three or four thin sandwiches. It keeps covered in the refrigerator for two or three days; let it come back to room temperature before spreading.
Savoury butters of this kind belong to the era of the afternoon tea table and the ladies' luncheon, when sandwiches were expected to be small, crustless and cut thin enough to see light through. Anchovy paste was a convenience product of the late nineteenth century — a shelf-stable jolt of what we would now call umami, sold in pots and jars and turned into everything from canapé butters to sauces for grilled meat. The pairing with grated cheese, paprika and mustard follows the same logic as a Welsh rarebit or a cheese straw: layer a salty, sharp and pungent note on top of fat and you get something that tastes far richer than its ingredients. The offer of "graham or white bread" is a small period marker too, since graham flour still carried the health-reform associations attached to it by the temperance preacher Sylvester Graham, whose name it bears.