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Savory Sandwiches (Mix together thoroughly Remove)
and mix together thoroughly. Remove the crust from a fresh, moist loaf of bread, cut in thin slices, spread each slice very delicately with butter and the caviare mixture, roll up in a roll and tie with ribbon one-fourth an inch wide, or pin with Chinese toothpicks. The bread should not be more than twelve hours old. If fear be lest the bread will not be sufficiently moist to roll, wrap the loaf, when taken from the oven, in a damp cloth and then in a dry one; keep in this fashion until ready for use.
The page begins mid-recipe: the ingredient list for the caviare mixture has been lost, and what survives is the assembly method for rolled sandwiches. The technique is the useful part, and it still works.
- The missing mixtureCaviare sandwich fillings of this period commonly combine caviar with lemon juice and some binder such as sieved hard-boiled egg yolk, a little grated onion, or softened butter, but this page preserves none of them. Since the original quantities are not here, treat the amounts as unknown rather than guessing at them from the instruction to "mix together thoroughly."
- The hinge: bread ageEverything depends on the loaf being no more than twelve hours old. Stale crumb cracks along the roll and the sandwich falls open; the damp-cloth-then-dry-cloth wrap described at the end is a genuinely effective way to hold a fresh loaf pliable for a few hours.
- Slicing thinCut lengthwise down the loaf if you can, in slices about 1/8 inch. A long serrated knife on a chilled loaf, or a bread slicer, gets closer to this than a short blade. Rolling across a horizontal slice gives a longer, neater spiral.
- Rolling insuranceIf a slice resists, flatten it with a rolling pin before spreading. Roll seam-side down and chill the finished rolls, covered with a damp towel, for half an hour to set the shape.
- Butter first, alwaysThe thin film of butter is structural as much as flavor: it seals the crumb against the wet caviare mixture, which would otherwise soak through and tear the bread.
- Chinese toothpicks and ribbon"Chinese toothpicks" most likely means the slim bamboo or wooden picks of the sort still sold today. The quarter-inch ribbon is decorative; if you use it, tie it on shortly before serving.
- Caviar todayWhatever caviar or roe you use should be kept refrigerated and the sandwiches served cold. Modern roe is usually more lightly salted than the pressed caviar of the period, so taste before adding any salt to the mixture.
- Yield and servingA standard sandwich loaf, trimmed and cut thin, gives roughly 16 to 20 rolls. These are a passed hors d'oeuvre, two or three to a person, and they are best made the same day.
Rolled sandwiches tied with narrow ribbon belong to the elaborate afternoon-tea and card-party repertoire that American cookbooks of the 1890s and 1900s catered to, when the sandwich had shifted from something a laborer carried to something arranged on a doily. Janet McKenzie Hill's Salads, Sandwiches and Chafing-Dish Dainties sits squarely in that world: the chafing dish and the fancy sandwich are often said to have been among the showpieces of hostess cookery in the era, both of them made at home but designed to look catered. Caviar reached American tables in quantity in exactly these decades, much of it not Russian at all but pressed roe from sturgeon in the Delaware River and the Great Lakes, which was cheap enough in the 1880s and 1890s that it is traditionally said to have appeared on free lunch counters, before overfishing collapsed the fishery and turned caviar back into a luxury. The instruction to wrap a hot loaf in a damp cloth is older kitchen craft than the recipe it serves, and points to a household where bread was still coming out of its own oven on a known schedule.