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Lettuce Sandwiches
Put fresh, crisp lettuce leaves, washed and thoroughly dried, between thin slices of buttered bread prepared as for Bread and Butter Folds, having a teaspoon of Mayonnaise on each leaf.
A two-line assembly recipe that assumes you have read two other entries in the same chapter. The only real work is drying the lettuce.
- Bread and Butter FoldsThe cross-reference is to the standard period technique: butter the cut face of the loaf before slicing, then cut a very thin slice and fold it. The referenced recipe is not reproduced here, so the finer details cannot be confirmed. Buttering the loaf rather than the loose slice is what lets you cut slices thin enough not to tear.
- Dry the leaves properlyThis is the hinge. Any water clinging to the lettuce will go straight through thin buttered bread. Spin or blot until the leaves squeak, and keep them cold until the moment of assembly.
- The butter is structuralA continuous film of soft butter, edge to edge, seals the crumb against both the mayonnaise and the lettuce. Butter at room temperature, not melted, or it soaks in and stops working.
- MayonnaiseThe capitalised cross-reference points to the uncooked oil-and-egg mayonnaise given elsewhere in the same book. A jarred mayonnaise made with pasteurized egg is the ordinary substitute now, and it holds up better in a sandwich that sits.
- Lettuce to useThe 'crisp' leaves called for point to a crisphead or a firm butterhead rather than a soft lettuce. Romaine hearts or iceberg give the snap intended; soft leaf lettuces wilt against the mayonnaise.
- Yield and holdingAt the teaspoon per leaf the recipe specifies, roughly a dozen folds needs only about a quarter cup of mayonnaise, with one small head of lettuce. Assemble no more than an hour ahead, stack under a damp towel, and refrigerate.
Lettuce sandwiches belong to the late nineteenth-century vogue for the tea table and the afternoon reception, where sandwiches were expected to be small, crustless, and pale rather than filling. Their appearance in a cooking-school book is practical: the chapter teaches a method "Bread and Butter Folds" and then rings changes on it, so a pupil learns one technique and several dishes.