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Cucumber Sandwiches
Soak thin slices of cucumber for one hour in good white vinegar, seasoned with salt and pepper, then lay them between thin, buttered slices of brown or white bread. Each sandwich may be the size of a cucumber slice, if daintiness is desired.
A short recipe with only one variable that matters: how much liquid the cucumber carries into the bread. Everything else is assembly.
- Drain before you buildAfter the hour in vinegar, lift the slices out and blot them dry on a towel. Wet slices laid straight onto buttered bread will soak through within minutes, and these are meant to be eaten soon after making.
- Butter is the barrierButter both cut faces, softened to spreading consistency, right to the edges. It is doing structural work here, not just adding flavour.
- "Good white vinegar"A plain distilled white vinegar or a white wine vinegar at about 5 per cent acidity. Cider vinegar will tint the slices and read as sweeter; malt vinegar overwhelms them.
- Slice thicknessAbout 1/16 inch, or the thinnest setting on a mandoline. Thick slices stay crunchy but slide out of the sandwich when bitten.
- Peel or notThe recipe says nothing about peeling. Cucumbers of the period were often thicker-skinned than modern ones, so peeling may well have been taken for granted; a modern English or Persian cucumber can go in unpeeled.
- Brown breadIn an American book of this kind this means a wholemeal or graham loaf, not the steamed molasses Boston brown bread. A close-crumbed sandwich loaf of either colour works; cut it a day old so it slices thin without tearing.
- The round sandwichesFor the "dainty" version, stamp the bread with a cutter matched to your cucumber's diameter, butter after cutting, and keep the rounds under a damp cloth until serving. Figure two or three per person alongside other sandwiches.
- TimingAssemble within half an hour of serving. These do not hold, and refrigerating them overnight produces a soggy, grey result.
Cucumber sandwiches belong to the English tea table of the later nineteenth century, where part of their appeal was that they were expensive to serve out of season: glass frames and heated houses were what put cucumbers on a spring tea tray. American books absorbed the form along with the rest of the afternoon-tea apparatus, and the sandwich became standard among the "dainty" fillings meant for teas, receptions and card parties. The vinegar soak here is a period touch — earlier cookery treated raw cucumber with suspicion as cold and indigestible, and steeping the slices in seasoned vinegar was one common corrective, carried over from serving cucumbers as a salad. Modern versions more often just salt the slices to draw out water, which is the same instinct arrived at by a different route.