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Boston Brown Bread Sandwich
Between thin slices of lightly buttered brown bread place a lettuce leaf that has been dipped in mayonnaise dressing.
A three-element sandwich whose success rests entirely on the bread. Everything below is about getting a steamed loaf into slices thin enough to work.
- The breadBoston brown bread is a steamed loaf of rye, cornmeal and wheat flour sweetened with molasses and raised with baking soda, not a yeasted wheat bread. It is sold in cans, most reliably in New England and by mail, and is still made at home in coffee tins or pudding moulds.
- Slicing it thinSteamed brown bread is moist and crumbles under a knife. The traditional method is to draw a length of unwaxed thread or dental floss around the cylinder and pull the ends past each other, which gives clean rounds about a quarter inch thick. Chilling the loaf first helps considerably.
- Buttering"Lightly buttered" matters here because the bread is already sweet and dense. Have the butter properly soft so you can spread without tearing the crumb.
- The lettuceA whole leaf dipped in dressing, not shredded leaf with dressing spooned over. Use a cupped inner leaf of butter or iceberg lettuce, dry it thoroughly, then draw it through the mayonnaise so it carries a thin coat and no pooling.
- Mayonnaise dressingIn period usage this normally meant a hand-beaten emulsion of raw yolk, oil and vinegar or lemon juice, often with mustard. Jarred mayonnaise is a direct substitute; if you make your own, pasteurized eggs are the sensible choice for anything served uncooked.
- Yield and servingTwo slices make one small round sandwich. Assemble close to serving time, as the dressed lettuce will weep into the bread.
Boston brown bread belongs to the New England tradition of steamed puddings and molasses baking, born of a colonial economy where rye and cornmeal were plentiful, wheat was not, and molasses came north from the West Indies trade. It is generally paired with baked beans on a Saturday supper table, and a canned version has long been a grocery staple. Its appearance in a sandwich book reflects the era's enthusiasm for the tea-table sandwich: small, delicate, more about contrast than substance. Here the contrast is the whole point, a sweet dark molasses crumb set against cool lettuce and tart dressing, and one might guess from the recipe's brevity that the author expected every reader to have brown bread in the house already.