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Tomato Sandwich
INGREDIENTS. 6 shredded-wheat biscuit. 4 medium-sized tomatoes. ½ a teaspoonful of salt. 8 teaspoonfuls of sugar, or 8 teaspoonfuls of mayonnaise dressing.
Method.-Peel the tomatoes, cut in small pieces, add the salt, and sugar, if used, and set aside in a cool place. Split the biscuits, dip the inside lightly into cold water without wetting the outside, put the halves together, and arrange in a buttered blazer; cover, and heat over hot water; then separate the halves, and, using a knife dipped in hot water, spread with butter. Put a layer of tomatoes on the bottom half, if sugar has not been used, add the salad dressing, and cover with the top of the biscuit, pressing it down lightly.
A chafing-dish assembly rather than a cooked dish: the whole thing hinges on softening a shredded-wheat biscuit just enough to eat it like bread without turning it to porridge.
- The blazerThe blazer is the upper pan of a chafing dish, set over its hot-water bath. A skillet or shallow saucepan set over a pan of simmering water does the same job, as does a covered steamer basket.
- Shredded-wheat biscuitThis means the full-sized pillow-shaped biscuit, roughly 4 by 2 inches, which can be split horizontally into two shells. The spoon-sized cereal squares will not work; look for the large whole biscuits, still sold in the UK, Canada and the US.
- The water dipDip only the cut face, and only for a second. The point is to steam the interior soft while the outer shreds stay crisp enough to hold together under the tomato juice.
- Salt quantity"1½ a teaspoonful" is a printing muddle for either half a teaspoon or a teaspoon and a half. For four tomatoes, start with half a teaspoon and taste.
- Sugar or dressing, not bothThe recipe offers a choice: sugar salts the tomatoes into a sweet-savoury filling, or mayonnaise dresses them. Eight teaspoonfuls of sugar across four tomatoes is close to three tablespoons, sweeter than most palates now want; a teaspoon or two is nearer modern taste.
- PeelingThirty seconds in boiling water and a plunge into cold slips the skins off cleanly. Drain the cut tomatoes before filling, or the biscuit collapses.
- Butter and knifeWarming the knife in hot water lets butter spread over a fragile shredded surface without tearing it. Soft room-temperature butter achieves the same thing.
- YieldSix biscuits make six sandwiches, enough for six as a light luncheon course or three as a lunch. Assemble at the last minute and serve at once.
Shredded wheat is generally traced to Henry Perky, who was producing the woven biscuits commercially in the 1890s, and the company that followed him promoted the biscuit relentlessly as an all-purpose foodstuff rather than merely a breakfast cereal, issuing booklets in which it stood in for toast, pastry shells and sandwich bread. That campaign is exactly what this recipe reflects: a manufactured convenience food being folded into the genteel American chafing-dish repertoire alongside creamed oysters and welsh rarebit. The chafing dish itself was at the height of its vogue around 1900, kept in the dining room or the parlour so that hostesses and college students could produce a hot dish without a kitchen, and books like this one supplied the small, quick, faintly showy things it could manage. The sugared tomato is a period marker too, sitting on the line between fruit and vegetable that American cooks were still negotiating.