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Tomato Sandwich
Take a slice of white bread buttered. On this lay a lettuce leaf, spread with cooked dressing. Place on it one perfect slice of tomato, cut thin and peeled. Add a top layer of bread. Use mayonnaise or cooked dressing.
A three-line sandwich whose success rests entirely on the tomato and the dressing. Two details in the original are worth unpacking.
- Cooked dressingA boiled dressing — egg, flour or cornstarch, vinegar, mustard and a little butter or milk, thickened over water and cooled. It was a common alternative to mayonnaise, tangier and less rich. Any modern boiled or cooked salad dressing recipe stands in.
- Peel the tomatoThe instruction is not decorative. An unpeeled slice slides out of the sandwich as you bite. Dip the whole tomato in boiling water for 10–15 seconds, then into cold, and the skin slips off before slicing.
- "One perfect slice"Cut from the widest part of the tomato so a single slice covers the bread. A thick slice weeps and collapses the bottom layer; the original asks only that it be cut thin.
- Salt and drainNot in the original, but if the tomato is very ripe, salt the slice and let it sit on paper towel for a few minutes before assembly. That draws off the water that would otherwise reach the bread.
- The butter mattersThe original butters only the bottom slice; buttering the top as well is a modern addition. The fat helps keep tomato juice from soaking into the bread.
- TimingAssemble immediately before serving. This is not a sandwich to wrap and carry; the dressing and the tomato both work against the bread quickly.
Tomato sandwiches belong to the era when tomatoes were a summer crop and a sandwich was expected to be an assembly of good raw things rather than a cooked filling. The alternative offered here, mayonnaise or cooked dressing, reflects a household in transition: jarred mayonnaise was becoming commercially available in the 1910s, while the flour-thickened boiled dressing long made at home on the stove remained in wide use.