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Beet and Cheese Sandwich
Slice bread thin. Spread one piece with beets that have been chopped very fine and moistened with mayonnaise dressing. The other spread with cream cheese. Press slices firmly together.
A two-spread sandwich from a 1909 collection, built on cooked beets and fresh soft cheese. Little needs conversion; the points below cover the ingredients that have shifted meaning and the texture problem the original glosses over.
- Beets must be cookedThe book assumes cooked, peeled beets, boiled or roasted at home; bottled or canned beets were also available by this date. Raw beet chopped fine stays crisp and watery and will not bind with mayonnaise. Roast or boil until a knife slides through, then cool completely before chopping.
- "Cream cheese" in 1909Period cream cheese was the soft, fresh, unstabilized kind sold in foil or by the spoonful, closer to a thick fromage blanc than to a modern brick. Block cream cheese works if you let it soften fully and beat it smooth; Neufchâtel or a whipped style spreads more like the original.
- Drain the beets hardThis is the hinge. Chopped beet holds a surprising amount of liquid, and mayonnaise thins into pink slurry that soaks through thin bread within minutes. Press the chopped beet in a sieve or blot it on paper towels, then add only enough mayonnaise to bind.
- Assembly orderSpread the cheese layer right to the crust edges so it seals the crumb against the beet moisture. Sandwiches like this were meant to be made shortly before serving, not packed for hours.
- Bread"Thin" here means a fine-textured sandwich loaf sliced as thinly as it will hold together. A firm white or light rye works; anything open-crumbed will go through.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no quantity. Use only a thin layer of each spread on bread this thin; cut into quarters or fingers, one sandwich gives four tea-sized pieces.
- SeasoningNothing is called for beyond the mayonnaise, and the result is flat by current taste. Salt, pepper, and a little lemon or the pickling liquid in the beet mixture bring it into line without changing its character.
The Up-to-Date Sandwich Book belongs to a burst of American sandwich publishing in the first decade of the twentieth century, when the sandwich had moved from a tavern snack to the centerpiece of the ladies' luncheon, the card party and the afternoon tea. Books of the period ran to hundreds of numbered variations, many of them differing only in which two spreads met in the middle, and the appeal was novelty in color and combination rather than substance — a beet filling gave a bright magenta against white cheese and thin white bread. Fresh cream cheese was newly convenient in this era, sold in small foil-wrapped portions rather than made at home, and sandwich books leaned on it heavily as a spread that needed no cooking and no skill.