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Egg-and-Spinach Sandwiches
Use cold boiled spinach, which when hot was chopped very fine or pressed through a colander, and sifted yolks of well-cooked eggs. Mix the spinach with sauce tartare and spread on one bit of bread, spread the other with butter and sifted yolk of egg; press together. Garnish the servingdish with parsley and cooked eggs cut in quarters lengthwise.
A tea-table sandwich from the era when spinach was boiled hard and pushed through a sieve. The whole thing hinges on getting the spinach dry: wet spinach will soak the bread through within minutes.
- Squeeze the spinach dryCold boiled spinach holds an astonishing amount of water. After chopping or sieving, wring it in a clean towel until no more liquid comes out, then mix with the sauce. This is the difference between a sandwich and a green smear.
- Sauce tartare, 1900 senseHere it means mayonnaise sharpened with chopped capers, gherkins, onion or shallot and parsley — not the sweet commercial tartar sauce sold for fried fish. A stiff, well-emulsified mayonnaise works best; a loose one will slacken further once the spinach releases moisture.
- Raw yolk in the mayonnaiseIf you make the sauce from scratch and the sandwiches will sit out on a garnished platter, use pasteurized eggs or a good jarred mayonnaise as the base. Nothing in this recipe is cooked after assembly.
- "Well-cooked eggs"Hard-boiled through, so the yolks are dry and crumbly enough to press through a fine sieve. About 12 minutes for large eggs, then cooled; underdone yolks turn to paste in the sieve rather than falling as powder.
- Sifted yolk on the butter sideThe butter is the glue — spread it soft and to the edges, then scatter the sieved yolk over it so it sticks. Salt and a little pepper belong here; the original specifies no seasoning.
- BreadA firm, close-grained white sandwich loaf, thinly cut, crusts off if you are following the period style. Cut the assembled sandwiches into fingers or triangles just before serving.
- Quantities and yieldThe original gives none. As a working ratio, about a cup of cooked squeezed spinach with 3 to 4 tablespoons of sauce and 3 sieved yolks fills roughly 8 to 10 sandwiches; reserve 2 hard-boiled eggs whole for the quartered garnish.
- Make close to servingAn hour ahead at most, covered with a damp cloth and refrigerated. These do not keep overnight.
Sandwiches of this kind are generally associated with the American ladies' luncheon and afternoon-tea repertoire around the turn of the twentieth century, when the sandwich is often said to have become a small, decorative, knife-and-plate food. The pairing of sieved hard yolk with butter appears in cookery of the period: it gave colour and body to a filling. Spinach here is doing double duty as vegetable and pigment, one of the reliable ways to get colour into cold food, alongside cochineal, saffron and other established domestic colourings. Sauce tartare had arrived in English-language cookbooks from French practice during the second half of the nineteenth century and by 1900 was familiar enough to be called for without explanation, which is why the recipe assumes the reader already has some on hand.