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Apple and Celery Sandwich
Chop three apples and three stalks of celery fine.
Mix with a little mayonnaise dressing and place on thin slices of lightly buttered white bread. Put the two slices together.
A four-line filling that depends entirely on texture and on keeping the apple pale. The book files it under "Egg" because mayonnaise is an egg dressing, not because there is egg in the sandwich.
- Chop fine means fineAim for a scant 1/4-inch dice on both apple and celery. Anything larger and the filling rolls out from between thin slices of bread at the first bite.
- Keep the apple from browningThis is the hinge. Toss the diced apple in lemon juice the moment it is cut, and dress it with the mayonnaise immediately; oxidation starts within minutes and a grey-brown filling is unappetising even though the flavour is unchanged.
- Which appleA firm, tart variety holds its shape and cuts the richness of the dressing. Granny Smith, Braeburn or a russet works; a soft, mealy apple collapses into sauce under the knife.
- Peel or notThe original is silent. Peeled gives a uniform, delicate filling; unpeeled adds colour and a little bite. Either is faithful enough.
- "A little mayonnaise"Around 3 to 4 tablespoons for three apples and three stalks. The dressing should bind, not coat. Too much and the bread goes damp before the sandwich reaches the table.
- Homemade dressingPeriod mayonnaise was made with raw yolks. If you make your own, use pasteurised eggs and keep the finished sandwiches refrigerated; commercial mayonnaise avoids the question entirely.
- The butter is not optionalLightly buttering both slices seals the crumb against the moisture in the apple and celery. Skip it and the bread turns soggy within the half hour.
- Yield and servingThree apples make enough for roughly 8 to 10 sandwiches. Trim the crusts and cut into triangles or fingers if serving at tea, and assemble no more than an hour ahead.
Eva Greene Fuller's Up-to-Date Sandwich Book (1909) belongs to the moment when the sandwich stopped being a slab of cold meat between bread and became a small, fussed-over item of American tea-table and luncheon cookery, sorted by filling into chapters. Apple and celery bound with mayonnaise is essentially Waldorf salad without the nuts; that salad is traced to the dining room of New York's Waldorf hotel in the mid-1890s, and generally credited to its maître d'hôtel Oscar Tschirky. Celery was a fashionable, comparatively expensive vegetable in this period, often served raw in a tall glass on the table as a delicacy in its own right, which is part of why it turns up so freely in the sandwich books of the era.