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Dill Sandwiches
Butter slices of white bread; cover half the slices with thin slices of the white meat of roasted chicken; put over this a thin layer of dill pickles. Cover with another piece of buttered bread, trim off the crusts, cut into triangles and serve on lettuce leaves.
A plain chicken sandwich whose only trick is keeping the pickle from wetting the bread. Everything else is assembly.
- Slice the pickle thin and dry itDill pickles carry a great deal of brine. Cut them lengthwise into thin planks, blot them on a towel, and lay them in a single layer so the butter and bread stay intact.
- The butter is structuralButter both cut faces right to the edge, softened but not melted. It acts as the moisture barrier between pickle and crumb; the recipe does begin with buttering, though it gives no reason for the order.
- White meat only, and coldBreast from a roasted bird, sliced thin across the grain once fully chilled. Warm chicken tears and slices thick, and it will steam the bread.
- Bread choiceA close-grained sandwich loaf, day-old, cut about a quarter inch. Modern airy commercial white bread compresses to nothing under a knife; chill the finished sandwich briefly before trimming for a clean edge.
- Trim after filling, not beforeAssemble whole slices, press gently, then cut away the crusts with a long thin knife in one stroke per side. Cutting first leaves the filling exposed at the edges.
- Yield and timingCut corner to corner a sandwich gives two triangles, or four if cut twice; the recipe says only 'triangles'. They can be made an hour ahead if covered with a damp cloth and refrigerated; beyond that the pickle wins.
- Salt and seasoningThe original calls for none, and does not say whether the butter is salted. A little pepper, or a thin smear of mustard butter, would not be out of keeping.
Butterick published cookbooks as an extension of its dressmaking-pattern business, aimed at the woman running a household without live-in help, and the sandwich chapter of such books grew steadily through the 1890s and 1900s as afternoon tea, card parties and picnic luncheons became fixtures of middle-class entertaining. Sandwiches of this kind were plausibly a way of using leftovers: the cold remains of a roasted fowl, sliced small and dressed up with something sharp. The dill pickle suggests the immigrant pickling trades that made barrelled dills widely available in American cities by this period, and the instruction to trim the crusts and cut into triangles served on lettuce is pure period presentation, marking a plate as company food rather than family food.