Celery Sandwich
Chop fine a few stalks of celery, mix with a little mayonnaise dressing, spread on thin slices of lightly buttered bread, cover with another slice.
A three-line sandwich that lives or dies on two things: how finely the celery is cut and how dry the bread stays. Both are worth a moment of attention.
- MayonnaisePeriod mayonnaise was beaten fresh with raw yolk. Commercial jarred mayonnaise is made with pasteurized egg and is the sensible substitute; if you make your own, use pasteurized eggs and eat it the same day.
- Chop fine means fineCelery cut coarse will slide out from between the slices at the first bite. Take the strings off the outer ribs with a peeler and cut to a 1/8-inch dice, or use the pale inner ribs, which are tender enough to skip the peeling.
- Drain itCelery is mostly water. Toss the dice with a pinch of salt, let it stand ten minutes, then blot dry before dressing, or the mayonnaise will thin and the bread will go grey.
- The butter is structural"Lightly buttered" is not a flavour note. A thin film of soft butter, spread edge to edge, seals the crumb against the dressing. Skip it and the sandwich is soggy in twenty minutes.
- SeasoningThe original gives none. Salt, white pepper, and a squeeze of lemon lift it; a little celery salt reinforces the celery without adding more water.
- BreadA close-grained white sandwich loaf, a day old, cut thin. Fresh bread tears under a thin blade. Crusts were routinely trimmed for this style of tea sandwich.
- YieldFour medium ribs, chopped, with about 3 tablespoons of mayonnaise, fill roughly six rounds of bread — twelve small tea sandwiches once quartered.
- HoldingAssemble no more than an hour ahead, cover with a barely damp cloth and then plastic, and refrigerate. Cut just before serving.
The Up-to-Date Sandwich Book belongs to a brief American vogue, roughly 1900 to 1920, for books consisting of nothing but sandwich fillings — the sandwich having moved from a workman's dinner to the centre of the ladies' luncheon and the afternoon tea table. Celery was a fashionable thing to put in one at the time: blanched, pale and expensive, it was grown in quantity in the muck soils around Kalamazoo, Michigan, and was served upright in cut-glass celery vases as a course of its own at formal dinners. Filling a sandwich with it may have been a way of using the ribs too short or too stringy for the vase, though that is supposition; the pairing with mayonnaise follows the same logic as the Waldorf salad of the previous decade — crisp, watery, near-flavourless vegetable carried by a rich egg dressing.