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Mock Crab Sandwiches
1/4 cupful 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 creamed butter.
Mrs. Wilson gives the proportions and leaves the rest to the cook: this is a pounded sandwich butter, mixed to a smooth paste and spread thin. A few of the terms have drifted since 1920.
- Creamed butterButter beaten alone until soft, pale and light — not butter with cream added. Two tablespoons at true room temperature, worked with a fork or small spatula, will take the other ingredients smoothly; cold butter will stay lumpy and the paste will tear the bread.
- Mustard means powderMustard likely means powder -- in a list measuring it by the quarter teaspoon alongside salt and paprika, this is almost certainly dry English mustard rather than prepared mustard from a jar. Prepared mustard would add vinegar and slacken the spread; if it is all you have, use about a teaspoon and expect a softer, tangier result.
- The cheeseAn aged, dry cheese that grates to a powder is what makes the illusion work — a sharp cheddar or a hard grating cheese. Fresh, moist supermarket shred will muddy the texture. A quarter cup grated is roughly 1 oz, less if grated very fine.
- Anchovy pasteStill sold in tubes and unchanged in character. It carries the salt and the marine note that stands in for crab, so taste before adding the salt; between the anchovy, the olives and the cheese, the extra quarter teaspoon may be unnecessary.
- Chopped olivesProbably green olives in brine, chopped fine and blotted dry; the recipe does not specify. Any brine left clinging will thin the butter and make the sandwiches soggy.
- Method, since none is givenCream the butter, work in the cheese and dry seasonings, then the anchovy paste, olives and lemon juice. Chill the paste until firm enough to spread cleanly, then use thin white bread with the crusts cut off.
- YieldAbout half a cup of filling — enough for six to eight small tea sandwiches, or three or four full slices' worth. It keeps covered in the refrigerator for two or three days and is better made a few hours ahead so the mustard and paprika bloom.
"Mock" dishes run all through nineteenth- and early twentieth-century cookery — mock turtle soup, mock duck, mock oyster — and they generally work by borrowing the seasoning profile of an expensive thing rather than its substance. Here the trick is anchovy, mustard and paprika against butter and sharp cheese: the combination reads as shellfish to the palate because these are much the same seasonings a period cook is likely to have put on real crab. Mary A. Wilson wrote for the Philadelphia Public Ledger and is associated with wartime food-conservation work, and her books are full of this kind of thrift — a filling built from pantry staples that produces a fashionable tea sandwich without a fishmonger. Sandwich butters of this sort, pounded smooth and spread on crustless bread, were a standard of the American afternoon-tea table in the 1910s and 1920s.