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Chevy Chase Sandwich
Put six hard-boiled eggs through a potato ricer.
To these add six sweet pickles, chopped fine, a dash of salt and white pepper, and two teaspoonfuls of melted butter; mix and place between thin slices of lightly buttered white bread.
A plain egg salad bound with butter rather than mayonnaise, which is the detail that dates it and also the detail that decides whether it works. A few notes before you start.
- Butter, not mayonnaiseTwo teaspoons of melted butter for six eggs is a very light bind, and it firms up as it cools, so the filling holds its shape rather than oozing. Mix and spread while the butter is still liquid; if it sets in the bowl the mixture stiffens and is harder to spread without tearing the bread.
- The potato ricerA ricer pressed hard-boiled eggs into fine, even threads long before food processors existed. A box grater on the coarse side, or the tines of a fork, gets close; a food processor will take it to paste in seconds and should be avoided.
- Sweet picklesIn this period these were generally small whole cucumber pickles put up in a sweet spiced vinegar, closer to today's sweet gherkins than to bread-and-butter chips. Six of them will give roughly 1/3 to 1/2 cup once chopped, depending on size, which is a generous ratio. Drain them well or the bread goes damp.
- White pepperPresumably called for so no dark flecks show in the pale filling. It is a genuinely different flavor from black pepper, more musty and less aromatic, and it is worth using as written.
- Hard-boiled eggsAim for fully set yolks that are still bright yellow, not chalky and gray-green. Twelve minutes from a boil, then straight into cold water, then peel.
- YieldEnough for about six sandwiches on standard sliced bread, or roughly two dozen small tea sandwiches if you trim the crusts and cut into fingers or triangles.
- Making aheadThe filling keeps a day covered in the refrigerator, but bring it back toward room temperature before spreading or the chilled butter will tear the bread. Assembled sandwiches are best within a couple of hours.
The book this comes from is one of a number of single-subject sandwich manuals published in the United States around the turn of the twentieth century, when the sandwich had moved from tavern food toward the ladies' luncheon, the card party and the afternoon tea. Recipes in that genre were often named for clubs, hotels and fashionable suburbs, and Chevy Chase may well be one of those: the Maryland district on the northwest edge of Washington, D.C., was developed from the 1890s, and its country club was a known society address by around 1900. The name itself is older, and is associated with the border ballad of Chevy Chase. Note that the filling is bound with butter rather than mayonnaise; commercial jarred mayonnaise did not become a pantry staple until the 1910s and after, and a butter-bound filling holds up well on a platter.