Home › Sandwiches › Cucumber and Onion Sandwiches
Cucumber and Onion Sandwiches
Cucumbers cut thin and minced onion. Let them stand in cold water for an hour. Butter bread with melted butter, then cooked dressing. Cover with slices of cucumber and onions and wrap in damp cloth to season. White bread.
A tea sandwich built on two old techniques: a cold-water soak to crisp the cucumber and tame the onion, and a film of melted butter to keep the bread from going soggy. Both still work.
- The hinge: keep water out of the breadMelted butter brushed edge to edge seals the crumb against cucumber juice. Cool it slightly so it sets rather than soaks in, and cover the whole surface including the corners.
- Salt and drain the cucumberDrain and dry the cucumber -- After the hour-long soak, drain the slices and press them between towels until they stop weeping. The recipe does not salt them, but a light salting before the soak, then a rinse and thorough drying, draws out more water still.
- Cooked dressingThis is boiled dressing, a common American sandwich spread of the period: egg yolks, flour or cornstarch, mustard, vinegar and milk, cooked to a custard and cooled. Tangier and less oily than mayonnaise. Bottled salad dressing of the Miracle Whip type is the nearest supermarket equivalent.
- Slice thicknessCut the cucumber on a mandoline at about a sixteenth of an inch. Thin enough to be translucent means the sandwich compresses instead of sliding apart.
- Onion quantityNone is given. A tablespoon of finely minced sweet or red onion per two cucumbers is plenty; the soak softens it, but raw onion still dominates if you are heavy-handed.
- The damp clothWrapping in a damp towel keeps the bread from drying and lets the filling season through. Do it in the refrigerator, not on the counter, and hold no more than two or three hours before serving.
- Bread and trimmingA fine-grained white sandwich loaf, sliced thin. Trim the crusts after assembly rather than before, which gives clean edges and less waste.
- YieldOne medium cucumber and eight slices of bread make four sandwiches, or sixteen fingers or triangles for a tea tray.
Mary A. Wilson was a Philadelphia cooking authority who wrote a widely syndicated newspaper cookery column and was associated with government food-conservation work during the First World War; her books are full of plain, thrifty, thoroughly practical formulas. Cucumber sandwiches came to American tea tables from the English tradition, where they were a mark of leisure: a vegetable of almost no nutritional weight, sliced thin and eaten with white bread. The American version, as here, is blunter, adding onion and a sharp cooked dressing rather than relying on butter alone. Cooked or boiled dressing was a common everyday spread in this period, since commercial mayonnaise was still relatively new and homemade mayonnaise took oil and a steady arm; a flour-thickened dressing was cheaper and suited the vinegar-forward palate of the day.