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Vegetable
Plain lettuce with salad dressing.
Sliced tomato with salad dressing, or lettuce and tomato. A small amount of diced, pickled cucumber with cottage cheese. Pickled beets, chopped and mixed with cottage cheese. Chopped celery, apple, nuts or olives (any proportion preferred), salad dressing.
Mixed pickle, sour or sweet, with chopped egg.
Mashed left-over beans or rubbed through colander, mixed with tomato sauce or salad dressing and chopped sour pickle or green pepper relish. جر
A list of vegetable sandwich fillings rather than a single formula: each line is a combination meant to be spread between buttered bread and packed for the midday meal. The proportions are left to the cook, which is workable once you know what the period assumed.
- "Salad dressing" is not mayonnaise"Salad dressing" may not mean mayonnaise -- in American household books of this era the term often covers a cooked or boiled dressing thickened with egg and flour and sharpened with vinegar, though in other books it includes mayonnaise. Either works here; the boiled type is less prone to separating in a warm lunch box.
- Bind it dryThe hinge of every one of these fillings is moisture control. Tomato, cucumber and beet all weep, so salt and drain sliced tomato and diced cucumber on paper towel first, and butter the bread to the edges to seal it.
- Cottage cheese then and nowCottage cheese of the period was often home- or dairy-drained curd and could be drier and more acidic than many tubs sold today. Use dry-curd or small-curd cheese and press out excess whey in a sieve, or the filling will soak through by noon.
- Keep it coldCottage cheese, chopped egg and egg-based dressing need to be kept chilled. Pack these with an ice block; without a cold source do not hold them more than about two hours. The pickled and vinegared fillings keep considerably better than the dairy and egg ones.
- Mashed beans"Rubbed through colander" means pressed through to a smooth paste, which also holds back some of the skins. Any cooked white, navy or kidney bean works; drain well and mash stiff, since a loose puree will not stay in the sandwich.
- Green pepper relishA sweet-sour chopped pepper condiment of the sort put up at home in this period. A modern sweet pepper relish is the closest stand-in.
- QuantitiesReckon roughly a third of a cup of filling per sandwich, so a cup of cottage cheese with its pickle or beet will fill three.
Lunch box chapters became a fixture of American cookbooks once schooling and factory and office work moved the midday meal out of the house, and by the early twentieth century such chapters were common in general household manuals. Books of this kind pushed vegetables and cottage cheese hard: the nutrition advice of the day was preoccupied with getting fresh produce and inexpensive protein into workers' and children's meals, and a sandwich was the cheapest vehicle available. The fillings here also reflect a pantry built on the home canning jar, where pickled beets, mixed pickle and pepper relish were staples on hand year round rather than occasional purchases.