Home › Sandwiches › Fried Egg Sandwiches
Fried Egg Sandwiches
2 tablespoonfuls Crisco 4 hard-cooked eggs 2 tablespoonfuls cream Salt, pepper, and red pepper to taste 2 rasped rolls Fritter batter Cut hard-cooked eggs free from shells into slices and pound with Crisco and cream to a paste. Season with salt, pepper, and red pepper. Cut rolls into thin slices, butter them, E Sandwiches spread them with the mixture and make into small sandwiches. Dip each sandwich into some prepared fritter batter, and fry to golden brown in hot Crisco. Drain and serve hot.
Sufficient for twelve sandwiches.
A deep-fried egg salad sandwich, sized as a small savoury for a tea table rather than a lunch. Two details in the original need translating before you start: the rolls and the batter.
- "Rasped rolls"Rasping meant grating the hard outer crust off a baked roll with a coarse rasp or grater, leaving a pale, soft surface. The point is a sandwich that takes batter evenly instead of being armoured in crust; a soft dinner roll or brioche bun needs no rasping at all.
- Fritter batter is not givenFritter batter is not given here — no proportions appear on this page. A plain modern one is 1 cup flour, 1 teaspoon baking powder, a pinch of salt, 1 egg and about 2/3 cup milk, whisked to the thickness of heavy cream. Too thin and it slides off the bread; too thick and the coating stays raw at the centre.
- Red pepperCayenne, used sparingly — an eighth of a teaspoon for four eggs. Period books distinguish it from black pepper, which appears separately in this list.
- Making the pasteThe original simply says to pound the eggs with the Crisco and cream to a paste; a few pulses in a food processor, or a fork and some patience, gives the same smooth result. Keep it stiff rather than loose, or it will squeeze out into the frying fat.
- Butter as well as CriscoThe recipe has you butter the bread even though shortening does the frying. The thin film of fat on the crumb keeps the filling from soaking in and helps the two slices hold together in the fat.
- Frying temperatureBring the Crisco to 365–375°F, deep enough to float the sandwiches. Below that the batter drinks fat; much above it and the coating colours before the bread inside has warmed through. Thirty to sixty seconds a side is usually enough.
- Chill before batteringNot in the original, but useful: fifteen minutes in the refrigerator firms the filling and makes the sandwiches far easier to dip and turn without splitting.
- Yield and servingTwelve small sandwiches, as the original states. They are meant to be served hot; the batter turns leathery as it cools.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was published by Procter & Gamble to introduce cooks to hydrogenated cottonseed oil, a product with no culinary tradition behind it, and the recipe pages exist to demonstrate its range: it creams like butter, fries like lard, and — a selling point repeated through the book — carries no flavour of its own and can be reused. This sandwich uses Crisco twice, first as the fat pounded into the egg paste and then as the deep-frying medium. Fried sandwiches were a familiar hot savoury of the period, a thrifty way to turn bread and hard-cooked eggs into something hot for a tea or supper table, and the technique has a relative in Italian mozzarella in carrozza and in the modern deep-fried grilled cheese. The instruction to butter the bread in a book devoted to promoting an alternative to butter suggests that these promotional cookbooks were often adapting existing recipes rather than writing new ones from scratch.