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Cucumber-Sandwich No. 3
Soak thin slices of cucumber for one hour in good white vinegar, season with salt and pepper. Place between thin slices of buttered brown bread. Cut in strips.
A three-line recipe whose success rests almost entirely on managing water. The vinegar soak seasons the cucumber but also draws out liquid, and that liquid will destroy the bread if it goes into the sandwich with it.
- Drain and blotAfter the hour in vinegar, lay the slices on a towel and press gently before assembling. Wet slices turn buttered brown bread to paste within minutes.
- Butter is structuralSpread the butter soft and right to the edges of both slices. It is the waterproof layer between cucumber and crumb, not a flavouring, so softened butter beats cold.
- Brown breadIn a sandwich context of this kind this most likely means a plain wholemeal or graham loaf rather than the steamed molasses Boston brown bread, though the term was used for both. A firm sandwich wholemeal, sliced thin, is the nearest equivalent.
- Which vinegar'good white vinegar' points to a white wine vinegar rather than a sharp distilled one. Distilled white will read as harsh here; white wine vinegar is closer to the intent.
- CucumberPeel if the skin is thick or waxed, and slice about 1/16 inch on a mandoline or the coarse side of a box grater's slicing blade. Seedy midsummer cucumbers are worth scraping; a slim English or Persian cucumber needs nothing.
- Season lateSalt and pepper the slices when they come out of the vinegar rather than in it, or the salt pulls out still more water over the full hour.
- Yield and timingOne medium cucumber and six slices of bread make three sandwiches, giving roughly a dozen to eighteen finger strips depending how narrowly you cut. Assemble within half an hour of serving; these do not hold overnight.
Cucumber sandwiches belong to the late-nineteenth-century tea table, where the point of a sandwich was delicacy rather than sustenance: thin, cut into strips or triangles and eaten in two bites. The vinegar soak here recalls the long-standing English habit of dressing sliced cucumber in vinegar and pepper before serving it as a cold relish with salmon or lamb, a treatment often said to be rooted in the old suspicion that raw cucumber was indigestible unless acidulated. American sandwich books of the 1900s multiplied variations on a handful of fillings, numbering them as this one does. The use of brown bread rather than white is a small period marker as well, whole-meal loaves being fashionable in the same decades for their supposed wholesomeness.