Home › Egg › Brown Egg Sandwich
Brown Egg Sandwich
Mash the yolks of five hard-boiled eggs and moisten with a teaspoonful of melted butter and a drop of vinegar, work to a paste, adding salt, pepper and a little French mustard, and a drop of tabasco. Spread the mixture between slices of lightly buttered Boston brown bread cut wafer thin. Garnish with an olive.
A simple yolk paste on steamed brown bread. The only real difficulty is the bread itself, which is dense, moist and inclined to crumble under a dull knife.
- Boston brown breadA steamed loaf of rye, cornmeal and wheat flour sweetened with molasses, still sold in cans and easily steamed at home. Its slight sweetness is the point of the sandwich, playing against the mustard and tabasco; ordinary wholemeal is not a substitute.
- Cutting wafer thinChill the loaf thoroughly first and use a long serrated knife with a sawing motion. Canned brown bread slices cleanly into rounds about an eighth of an inch thick when cold and tears when warm.
- French mustardIn this period the term generally meant a smooth, vinegar-based Dijon-style mustard rather than the coarse or turmeric-yellow kinds. Dijon is the right reading; the recipe asks only for 'a little', so start sparingly, since the filling is small.
- The whitesThe recipe uses only the yolks of five eggs and says nothing about the rest. Chop the whites into a salad or a second sandwich filling rather than discarding them.
- TexturePress the yolks through a sieve rather than mashing with a fork if you want the paste smooth enough to spread on thin bread without tearing it. A teaspoon of melted butter is barely enough to bind five yolks; add a little more if the paste crumbles.
- Vinegar and tabasco"A drop" is meant literally in both cases. The vinegar sharpens the yolks and the tabasco is for warmth at the back of the palate, not heat.
- YieldFive yolks fill roughly six to eight small sandwiches on wafer-thin brown bread, cut into fingers or rounds for a tea tray. Assemble no more than an hour or two ahead and keep covered and cold, or the bread dries at the edges.
Boston brown bread is a New England survival of an older cooking world: a batter of rye and cornmeal, leavened with saleratus or soda and sweetened with molasses, steamed for hours in a covered mould set in a kettle because, as the traditional explanation goes, the household had no reliable oven. It had become a fixture of the tea table and the picnic hamper, and it was sold ready-steamed in cylindrical tins that gave the round slices seen in countless sandwich recipes of the period. Sandwich books proliferated around the turn of the twentieth century, driven by the fashion for afternoon teas, card parties and chafing-dish suppers, and they lean heavily on hard-boiled egg fillings, which were cheap, kept reasonably well, and could be seasoned a dozen different ways. The tabasco and "French mustard" here mark the recipe as an urban, faintly cosmopolitan one; the olive garnish was a common finishing touch of the era.