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Cottage Sandwich
Cut slices of brown bread, do not remove crusts; rub half a pint of cottage cheese to a smooth paste, then press it through fine sieve. Add two tablespoonfuls of melted butter, slowly beating the while, add half a teaspoonful of salt, and two tablespoonfuls of thick cream; spread each slice of the bread with mixture; cover with another thin slice of white bread and on top of that another thin layer of cheese; place a slice of brown bread on top and trim into shape. Garnish with an olive.
A triple-decker tea sandwich built on a seasoned cottage cheese paste. Nothing here is difficult, but the texture of the filling is the whole point, and it depends on two things: sieving and temperature.
- Half a pint of cottage cheeseOne US cup, roughly 8 ounces by weight. Use a small-curd or dry-curd cheese; today's very wet tubs will need draining in a sieve for 20 minutes or the filling will soak the bread.
- Sieve it, then sieve it againThe instruction to rub the cheese smooth and then press it through a fine sieve is not redundant fussiness. Curds that survive intact read as lumps against thin bread. A food processor gets close but a fine mesh sieve or a drum sieve gives the silkier result the recipe is after.
- Warm the cheese before the butter goes inMelted butter beaten into cold cheese sets into gritty flecks. Have the cheese at room temperature, add the butter in a slow stream while beating, and stop as soon as it is homogeneous.
- Thick creamHeavy or double cream, not clotted cream and not sour cream. Two tablespoons is enough to loosen the paste to a spreadable consistency; add it last so you can judge.
- Brown breadMost likely a plain wholemeal or graham loaf, possibly a molasses-sweetened Boston-style brown bread. Any dense wholemeal sandwich loaf works. The recipe says not to remove the crusts, though it also directs trimming into shape after assembly; no reason is given for either.
- The constructionBrown, cheese, thin white, cheese, brown: two layers of filling, three of bread, with the striping visible once cut. Slice the bread as thin as it will go and trim only after assembly, with a long serrated knife, so the layers stay aligned.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no yield. A cup of filling might stretch to eight or ten sandwiches' worth of layers, perhaps 24 to 30 fingers or triangles. Assemble no more than an hour ahead and keep them covered with a damp cloth; the sieved filling begins to weep and the trimmed edges dry quickly.
- The oliveThe recipe asks only for 'an olive' as garnish; a whole green olive, speared or set on top, is the natural reading. A dark salt-cured olive risks bleeding colour onto the pale filling.
Sandwich books proliferated in the United States between about 1900 and 1920, when the afternoon tea, the card party and the boxed luncheon all called for something small, cold and portable, and when a cook cut her own bread. The layered brown-and-white construction here is a standard trick of that literature: colour, not flavour, is doing the decorative work, which is why the white slice is specified thin. Cottage cheese suited the genre because it was cheap, often made at home from surplus milk, and bland enough to carry butter, cream and salt without competing with them. The name "cottage" for this fresh, unripened curd is generally traced to that domestic origin, cheese made in the cottage rather than the dairy, though the derivation is traditional rather than documented.