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Celery Sandwiches
Chop crisp celery very fine and mix with salad dressing. Spread one piece of bread with butter, the other with a thin layer of the mixture. With a sharp knife split open the round stems of celery tips and put them between the bread, so that the tips will just show on the edges. Tie with narrow ribbon, light-green in color.
A simple tea sandwich whose only difficulty is keeping the filling from soaking the bread. Two decisions carry the whole thing: how finely the celery is cut and how thick the dressing is.
- Drain the celeryFinely chopped celery weeps within minutes. Chop it, spread it on a towel and press before mixing, or the buttered slice will be damp by the time the sandwiches reach the table.
- What "salad dressing" means hereIn American books of this general period the term may mean either a boiled dressing — a cooked flour-and-egg base sharpened with vinegar and mustard — or a mayonnaise. Either works; use a thick one, thinned with nothing, so the filling holds together.
- Butter is structuralThe instruction to butter one slice and fill the other is not decoration. A full edge-to-edge layer of soft butter seals the crumb against moisture.
- The celery tipsSplitting the round stems lets the leafy tops lie flat between the slices while the fringe shows at the cut edge. Use the pale inner heart leaves; the outer dark ones are tough and bitter.
- BreadA fine-crumbed white sandwich loaf, cut thin, suits this kind of sandwich, though the recipe specifies nothing. Chilling the loaf for half an hour makes thin, even slices far easier.
- The ribbonThe recipe's narrow light-green ribbon is purely ornamental, comes off before eating, and should be new ribbon that has not been near dye that runs.
- Yield and holdingThe recipe gives no yield; a head of celery chopped fine will supply more filling than a small batch needs. Assemble no more than an hour ahead, cover with a barely damp cloth and refrigerate; beyond that the bread goes limp whatever you do.
Celery held a status in American entertaining now hard to credit: through the late nineteenth century it was raised in trenches, blanched, sold expensively, and served upright in tall cut-glass celery vases as a centrepiece rather than a snack. Its crispness and faint bitterness made it a natural for the fashionable afternoon tea and reception sandwich, a form that ran heavily to thin white bread, sweet butter and a soft filling cut small.