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Radish Sandwiches
½ cup potted ham
½ cup sliced radishes
¼ to ½ cup mayonnaise
Peel and slice radishes, dip them in rich, thick mayonnaise, and lay on thin slices of bread covered with potted ham.
A tea-table sandwich that depends entirely on the contrast between a salty spread and a cold, crisp vegetable. The whole thing is assembly, so the only decisions that matter are thickness and timing.
- Potted hamAt the turn of the century this meant ham pounded to a paste with butter and spice, sealed under clarified butter, or the canned deviled ham sold in small tins. Either canned deviled ham or a food-processor paste of cooked ham, softened butter and a little mustard and mace will do; you want about 4 oz for the half cup.
- Slice the radishes paper-thinThick coins make the sandwich crunch apart and taste raw and hot. A mandoline or a steady hand at about 1/16 inch gives slices that lie flat and read as texture rather than as chunks of vegetable.
- Salt and drain firstRadishes throw water. Salting the slices lightly for ten minutes and blotting them dry keeps the mayonnaise from thinning and the bread from going grey and damp within the hour.
- "Rich, thick mayonnaise"Period mayonnaise was often stiffer than many jarred versions. Commercial mayonnaise works; if it seems loose, beat in a spoonful of the ham paste to stiffen it so the coating clings to each slice.
- The breadThin slices here suggests a close-crumbed white sandwich loaf, cut around 1/4 inch; crusts were commonly trimmed for tea sandwiches of this kind. Chilling the loaf before slicing makes thin cuts possible without tearing.
- Yield and servingThese quantities fill roughly eight to ten small sandwiches, cut into fingers or triangles. Assemble within an hour of serving and keep them covered with a damp cloth in the refrigerator; they do not hold overnight.
- If you make the mayonnaiseA scratch mayonnaise here is uncooked egg yolk in a sandwich that is never heated. Use pasteurised eggs if serving anyone elderly, pregnant, very young or immunocompromised.
Sandwich chapters swelled enormously in American household books between about 1890 and 1920, driven by the afternoon tea, the card party and the packed luncheon, and Butterick's list is typical in treating the sandwich as a filing system rather than a set of dishes: a base spread, something crisp, something to bind. Potted meats were the workhorse of that system — before home refrigeration, meat pounded with butter and sealed kept for weeks in the larder, and by the turn of the century tinned deviled ham had made the same texture available for pennies without any pounding at all. The radish is doing what cucumber and watercress do elsewhere in these lists: supplying cold crunch and a little pepper against a soft, salty, fatty spread. Radishes were also one of the earliest things out of a kitchen garden in spring, which may be part of why they turn up so often in the sandwich and relish pages of books of this period.