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Cottage Sandwich No. 2
On thin slices of lightly buttered graham bread spread cottage cheese that has been mixed with a little chopped chives. Cover with another slice of bread.
A two-ingredient filling that depends entirely on the texture of the cheese and the freshness of the chives. Nothing here needs modernising except your expectations of what "cottage cheese" meant in 1909.
- Cottage cheese, then and nowPeriod cottage cheese was a home-drained curd, drier and more crumbly than the wet, gum-stabilised tubs sold today. Drain supermarket small-curd cheese in a sieve for 20-30 minutes, or use a dry-curd or farmer's cheese, otherwise the bread turns to paste.
- Graham breadGraham flour is coarsely ground whole wheat including the bran and germ, named for Sylvester Graham. Any good whole-wheat sandwich loaf stands in; a dense, faintly sweet one suits the mild filling best.
- The butter is structural"Lightly buttered" is not a flourish. A thin film of butter on the cut face seals the crumb against moisture from the cheese, which matters if the sandwiches sit even half an hour before serving.
- SeasoningThe original gives none. Fresh curd needs salt and a few grinds of pepper or the filling reads as blank against whole-wheat bread.
- ChivesSnip with scissors rather than chopping with a knife, which bruises them and draws out water. Roughly a tablespoon per half cup of cheese is a reasonable starting ratio.
- Yield and servingHalf a cup of drained cheese fills three or four sandwiches. Trimmed crusts and triangles or fingers would suit a filling this mild, though the recipe itself says nothing about how it is to be cut or served.
Sandwich books were a small publishing genre in the first decades of the twentieth century, when the sandwich had moved from tavern food to the centre of ladies' luncheons, card parties and afternoon teas, and hostesses wanted variety by the hundred. Cottage cheese was still a routine byproduct of the household milk supply: clabbered milk drained of its whey, made at home or bought from a dairyman rather than a factory. The pairing with graham bread is characteristic of the period's health-conscious strain, traceable to Sylvester Graham's advocacy of coarse unsifted wheat flour in the 1830s and 1840s, whose name outlived his dietary preaching and attached itself to bread, crackers and flour alike. "Cottage" in such names is traditionally taken to signal plainness and cheapness, the food of a small household, though the connection is not documented; the "No. 2" suggests the book had already given one version and, in the manner of these collections, saw no reason to stop there.