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Tea Sandwiches
The tea sandwich is an aristocratic affair, seldom made of meat, though minced chicken or turkey, or sardines beaten to a paste are sometimes used for it. The bread is cut very thin and encloses a bit of lettuce spread with mayonnaise dressing, chopped olives, nasturtiums or watercress. An attractive sandwich is made from diminutive Vienna rolls split not quite through and spread with the vegetable filling. Butter is not used, the dressing taking its place.
Another tea sandwich is made by spreading jelly or preserves between two salt or water crackers.
This is a formula rather than a numbered recipe: a set of proportions and principles for the thinnest sandwiches on the table. The points below fill in what a 1910 cook would have assumed.
- Dressing instead of butterThe instruction to skip butter is the one thing here that has consequences. Butter waterproofs bread; mayonnaise does not, so these sandwiches must be assembled shortly before serving or the thin bread will wet through. If you need to make them an hour ahead, spread a very thin film of softened butter on the bread anyway and put the mayonnaise on the filling side.
- Mayonnaise and raw egg"Mayonnaise dressing" in this period usually meant a hand-beaten oil-and-raw-yolk emulsion served without cooking, though some books of the era applied similar names to cooked or boiled dressings. If the dressing is raw, use pasteurized eggs or a commercial mayonnaise if you are feeding children, the elderly or anyone pregnant, and keep the finished sandwiches cold.
- Cutting the breadA day-old close-grained white loaf, well chilled, slices thinner than fresh bread; something around 1/8 inch is a reasonable reading of "very thin." Trim the crusts after filling rather than before, so the layers are cut flush.
- NasturtiumsBoth the peppery leaves and the blossoms were common salad material in this period and are still edible. Use plants you know have not been sprayed, and pick the young leaves; older ones are coarse and very hot.
- Vienna rollsSmall crusty white rolls, roughly the size of a modern dinner roll or a short Portuguese-style bun. Split them nearly through so they hinge, and fill without flattening.
- Sardines beaten to a pasteDrain them well and mash with a fork to a smooth paste; a little of the mayonnaise loosens it. Skinless-boneless tins save work, though the soft bones in ordinary sardines mash away to nothing.
- The cracker sandwichJelly between two soda or water crackers goes soft within minutes. Assemble these at the last moment, or set out the crackers and preserves and let people put them together.
- Yield and servingThe original gives none. Reckon one standard sandwich loaf slice, crusts off, cut into three fingers or four triangles, and four to six small pieces per person at a tea table. Keep them under a damp cloth in the refrigerator until serving.
Tea sandwiches belong to the English afternoon tea that middle-class American households took up enthusiastically in the late nineteenth century, and the word "aristocratic" here is doing real work: the point of the thing was restraint, in contrast to the substantial meat sandwiches then eaten at picnics and railway lunch counters. The nasturtium filling reflects a genuine period taste for peppery flowers and leaves in cold dishes, and the closing suggestion of jelly between two water crackers is a reminder how far the category stretched.