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Club Cheese
Prepare twelve toasts, lightly butter and arrange a thin slice Swiss cheese over six. Lay six slices freshly broiled bacon cut in two over cheese, spread a very little mayonnaise over six well cleaned and drained lettuce leaves, arrange on top of bacon and cover with remaining six toasts. Neatly trim off crusts, cut in triangular halves, dress on a dish, set in oven for two minutes, remove and serve.
A club sandwich in its early form, before the three-decker version took over. The instructions are complete; what needs translating is the vocabulary and the brief trip to the oven.
- YieldTwelve toasts make six sandwiches, cut into twelve triangles. That is six servings as a light lunch, or twelve as a tea or supper savoury.
- The oven stepTwo minutes in the oven is meant only to warm the bread through and soften the cheese; the recipe gives no temperature. Any longer and the lettuce wilts and the mayonnaise separates and runs.
- Consider skipping itCommercial mayonnaise is a more stable emulsion than the hand-whisked kind and tolerates warmth a little better, but it still breaks. If you want the cheese melted, put the cheese on the hot toast at assembly and leave the oven out of it.
- "Freshly broiled bacon"Broiled here means grilled or pan-crisped, not baked. Cook it until crisp but still bendable; brittle bacon shatters when you cut the sandwich.
- Swiss cheeseIn 1906 American usage this is Emmentaler or a domestic imitation of it. A thin slice means genuinely thin, shaved rather than cut, so it warms in the same two minutes as the bread.
- Toast the bread properlyThe bread does the structural work, and there is butter, mayonnaise and lettuce moisture pressing on it. Toast to a firm medium brown on both sides and butter while hot.
- Trimming and cuttingTrim the crusts after assembly, as written, so the layers stay aligned, and cut with a serrated knife in a single sawing pass. Press the sandwich lightly with your palm before cutting rather than bearing down with the blade.
The club sandwich is generally traced to American gentlemen's clubs and clubhouses of the late 1880s and 1890s. This version, from Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book (1906), is the earlier two-slice form: the familiar triple-decker with turkey or chicken came later and gradually displaced it. Filippini had spent years in the Delmonico's kitchens in New York, which is where a good deal of the book's American material comes from.