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Bread and Butter Folds
Remove end slice from bread. Spread end of loaf sparingly and evenly with butter which has been creamed. Cut off as thin a slice as possible. Repeat until the number of slices required are prepared. Remove crusts, put together in pairs, and cut in squares, oblongs, or triangles. Use white, entire wheat, Graham, or brown bread. Three layer sandwiches are attractive when made of entire wheat bread between white slices.
A tea-table staple from the era before bread came pre-sliced. The whole technique is in the order of operations: butter the cut face of the loaf first, then slice.
- Butter the loaf, not the sliceThis is the hinge. Spreading the exposed end of the loaf and then cutting means the slice comes away already buttered, so a paper-thin slice never tears under the knife. Reverse the order and thin bread shreds.
- "Creamed" butterButter beaten soft and smooth with a spoon or paddle, not melted. Leave it at room temperature 30-45 minutes, then work it until it spreads without dragging.
- Bread names"Entire wheat" is whole wheat flour; "Graham" is a coarser whole-wheat meal including the bran, sold today as graham flour. "Brown bread" may mean either a plain darker wheat loaf or the steamed molasses-and-cornmeal loaf; the recipe does not say which.
- Use day-old breadA fresh loaf compresses and tears. Bread baked the day before, with a close crumb, is what makes the thinness possible. A long thin-bladed knife, wiped between cuts, helps more than a serrated one.
- Holding themCover with waxed paper and a barely damp towel and refrigerate up to a few hours. Uncovered, thin bread and butter dries at the edges quickly.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; a loaf sliced thin, paired and quartered will produce a large number of small tea sandwiches, so cut to the size of the party rather than to a fixed count.
These are tea sandwiches in their plainest form, and their presence says a good deal about how bread was bought when whole loaves were sliced at home by hand, with commercial pre-sliced bread still decades off. Thinness was the mark of skill, and buttering the loaf face before cutting is often said to have been the usual way of achieving it. The suggested combinations -- white, whole wheat, graham, brown -- reflect the late nineteenth-century American enthusiasm for whole-grain flours associated with Sylvester Graham's dietary reform movement, by then absorbed into ordinary commercial baking. The three-layer version, dark bread showing as a stripe between two pale slices, closely resembles the ribbon and pinwheel sandwiches that filled ladies' luncheon menus for the next half century.