Home › Egg › Cucumber and Chives Sandwich
Cucumber and Chives Sandwich
On thin slices of lightly buttered white bread, place thin slices of cucumber, over which sprinkle chopped chives; cover with another slice of bread and cut in squares.
Three ingredients and no measurements, which means the whole dish rests on technique: the cucumber has to be dry and the butter has to seal the bread.
- Salt and drain the cucumberSlice as thinly as you can manage, salt lightly, and let the slices sit in a colander for 20-30 minutes, then press them between towels. Unsalted cucumber releases water into the crumb and can leave the bread soggy.
- Butter means a sealed surfaceThe recipe says only "lightly buttered," but butter spread edge to edge and soft enough to go on in a continuous film acts as a moisture barrier; a scraped-on smear of cold butter leaves gaps and the bread goes gray.
- The breadA close-grained white sandwich loaf, cut about 1/4 inch thick. Day-old bread slices thinner and cleaner than fresh. The recipe does not mention the crusts; trimming them before cutting into squares is a reasonable reading but not stated.
- ChivesSnipped fresh chives, roughly a teaspoon per sandwich. Dried chives contribute nothing here and freeze-dried ones rehydrate into wet green flecks.
- CuttingCut with a long thin knife wiped between strokes, and cut only after the top slice is pressed down. The recipe specifies only "squares" and gives no number; four from a trimmed slice is a workable tea-sized portion.
- Yield and holdingCut into four, two slices of bread give four small squares, so figure two to three sandwiches per person at tea. Assemble no more than an hour ahead and keep them under a damp cloth in the refrigerator.
The cucumber sandwich belongs to the late nineteenth-century English tea table, where its point was partly that it had none: no meat, no substance, nothing to spoil an appetite before dinner, and a vegetable that until the spread of glasshouse growing was expensive out of season. Sandwich compendiums absorbed the form wholesale and then multiplied it, adding chives, cress, nasturtium, or a thin slick of anchovy to distinguish one page from the next. The chives here do real work, since a cucumber on buttered bread is otherwise almost entirely texture. Books like this one appeared in numbers around the turn of the century, a boom often attributed to the sandwich having lately become a respectable thing to serve at home to guests, at card parties, luncheons and afternoon receptions, rather than merely something wrapped in paper and carried to work.