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Egg Creole Sandwiches
For each sandwich allow one-half a chopped, hard-boiled egg, one shredded sardine, one-half tablespoon chow chow and Mazola Mayonnaise to blend. Spread on buttered bread, top with a second slice of bread, press together and cut in triangles and serve.
A per-sandwich formula rather than a batch recipe, which makes it easy to scale but leaves the proportions tight. The filling is essentially an egg salad sharpened with fish and pickle, and it needs to be bound just enough to hold without soaking the bread.
- Scale it upThe recipe is written per sandwich: half an egg, one sardine, half a tablespoon of chow chow. For four sandwiches use 2 hard-boiled eggs, 4 sardines, 2 tablespoons chow chow and roughly 2 to 3 tablespoons mayonnaise.
- "Mazola Mayonnaise"The branded name points to a Mazola-linked source, and the mayonnaise was presumably one made with that corn oil. Any good mayonnaise works; a plain neutral-oil one is closest in flavour to the original.
- Chow chowA mixed vegetable pickle in mustard or vinegar brine, usually cabbage, green tomato, onion and pepper. Bread-and-butter pickle relish or a mustard piccalilli substitutes well. Drain it before chopping or the filling will weep.
- SardinesOil-packed sardines, drained and shredded with a fork, bones and all. One standard tin holds four to six fish, so a tin makes about four to six sandwiches at this ratio.
- "To blend"The mayonnaise is a binder, not a dressing. Add it a teaspoon at a time until the mixture just clings; too much and the filling slides out when cut.
- Buttered bread mattersThe butter is a moisture barrier between the wet filling and the crumb, not a flavouring. Butter both slices to the edges if the sandwiches are made even half an hour ahead.
- Cutting and servingThe recipe calls only for cutting in triangles; trimming the crusts first is optional and gives a tea-sandwich look. Two triangles per person suits a luncheon plate; four make a light main.
- KeepingEgg and fish filling should be refrigerated and eaten the same day. Make the filling ahead if you like, but assemble close to serving.
"Creole" on American menus of the period often signalled less a Louisiana origin than a general piquancy; it was commonly shorthand for tomato, pepper or pickle in the mix, and here it is the chow chow doing the work. The sandwich itself belongs to the ladies' luncheon and card-party tradition, when crustless triangles served cold from a platter let a hostess prepare everything in advance. Chow chow is generally said to have been a common pantry item in that era, put up at home in late summer from the last of the green tomatoes and cabbage, and tinned sardines are often described as among the cheapest reliable proteins on the shelf -- an economical filling dressed up with a fashionable name.