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Egg Sandwiches
These are good for travelling lunches or picnics. Slice cold hard boiled eggs and lay them between very thin, buttered slices of bread, seasoning them with salt, pepper and paprika.
A two-line recipe with nothing to go wrong, so the only useful notes concern the egg itself and how the sandwich survives a few hours in a basket.
- Hard-boiling without the grey ringCover the eggs with cold water, bring to a bare simmer, then take the pan off the heat and leave them covered 10-12 minutes before chilling in cold water. The green-grey layer around the yolk that older cookbooks accepted as normal is simply overcooking.
- Slicing cleanlyAn egg slicer or a thin blade wiped between cuts keeps the yolks from crumbling out. Cold eggs also slice better than warm ones, though the recipe's 'cold' may simply mean the sandwich is to be eaten cold.
- Paprika is doing real workIn this period paprika generally meant a mild, sweet type, used for colour and gentle fruitiness rather than heat. Smoked or hot paprika will take the sandwich somewhere quite different.
- Butter the bread to the edgesThe butter is a moisture barrier as much as a seasoning; egg white weeps, and bare bread goes damp. Softened, not melted, spread right out to the crust.
- Season the egg, not the breadSalt drawn straight onto buttered bread stays in patches. Lay the slices down first, then salt and pepper them so the seasoning reaches the yolk.
- Travelling safelyCooked egg held at room temperature is a reasonable risk for an hour or two, not an afternoon in the sun. Pack the sandwiches cold with an ice pack if they are going any distance.
- YieldOne egg fills one sandwich comfortably; six eggs and a small loaf give six sandwiches, or twelve halves for a picnic.
Egg sandwiches earned their place in a section like this because they solved a specific early-twentieth-century problem: how to feed a family away from a kitchen. Railway travel, day excursions and church picnics all created demand for food that could be assembled in the morning and eaten cold at noon, and the sandwich was the standard answer. The insistence on very thin bread is a marker of the period's taste, when thick slices read as coarse and a well-bred sandwich was expected to be dainty; commercially sliced bread was not yet widespread, so thinness was a test of the cook's knife. Paprika appears here as a fashionable touch, sprinkled on eggs, canapes and creamed dishes as much for its cheerful colour as its flavour.