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Cucumber and Onion Sandwich
Chop fine one large cucumber and a small white onion. Add a dash of pepper and salt and moisten with a little mayonnaise dressing. Place between thin slices of lightly buttered Boston brown bread.
A tea sandwich that depends almost entirely on how much water you take out of the cucumber before it meets the bread. Everything else is assembly.
- Salt and drain firstChopped cucumber sheds a surprising amount of liquid within minutes, and mayonnaise will not hold it. Toss the chopped cucumber with the salt, let it sit 20-30 minutes in a sieve, then press or wring it in a clean towel before adding the onion and dressing.
- The onion is a seasoning, not a fillingThe recipe calls for a small onion against one large cucumber, so use two or three tablespoons of very finely minced sweet or white onion at most, or the cucumber disappears entirely.
- Boston brown breadThe steamed molasses loaf of rye, cornmeal and wheat leavened with baking soda, traditionally cooked in a can. Canned brown bread is still sold and slices neatly; chill it thoroughly and cut with a serrated knife so the slices hold at tea-sandwich thinness.
- Butter is structuralThe thin film of butter on each slice is what keeps the damp filling from soaking into the bread. Have it properly soft and spread it edge to edge rather than sparingly in the middle.
- MayonnaisePeriod cookbooks assume a homemade dressing built on raw yolks. Commercial mayonnaise, made with pasteurized egg, is the sensible substitute; if you make your own, use pasteurized eggs and keep the finished sandwiches cold.
- Yield and timingOne large cucumber fills roughly six to eight sandwiches, cut into fingers or quarters for about two dozen pieces. Assemble no more than an hour ahead and keep them covered with a damp cloth in the refrigerator.
Eva Greene Fuller's Up-to-Date Sandwich Book belongs to the brief, dense period around 1900-1920 when the sandwich stopped being a slab of meat between bread and became a category with hundreds of named variations, driven by afternoon tea and card parties. The Boston brown bread is the more distinctly American touch — a steamed rye-and-cornmeal loaf with molasses, a New England Saturday-night staple usually eaten alongside baked beans, here pressed into service for a delicate tea sandwich, where its faint sweetness and close crumb do genuinely good work against salted cucumber and raw onion.