Home › Egg › Cucumber Sandwich No. 4
Cucumber Sandwich No. 4
Chop cucumbers fine, add a pinch of salt and pepper and a dash of French dressing. Mix and place between thin slices of lightly buttered white bread, with a crisp lettuce leaf between.
A four-line sandwich that lives or dies on drainage. Everything else here is seasoning.
- Salt and drain firstChopped cucumber releases a great deal of water within minutes of being salted. Toss the chopped flesh with the salt, let it sit 15-20 minutes in a sieve, then press out the liquid before dressing it — otherwise the bread is soaked through before the plate reaches the table.
- Which cucumberField cucumbers of the period were often thick-skinned and seedy, and period recipes commonly call for peeling and sometimes seeding them. An English or Persian cucumber needs neither, and gives less water to begin with.
- French dressing, 1909 senseSimply oil and vinegar with salt and pepper, roughly three parts oil to one of vinegar, whisked to a temporary emulsion. Not the sweet orange bottled dressing that later took the name in the United States. A dash is a small amount — a teaspoon or so for a whole cucumber is a reasonable reading.
- Butter is structural"Lightly buttered" still means edge-to-edge coverage. The fat film is what keeps the dressing and cucumber liquid off the crumb, so use butter soft enough to spread thin without tearing the slice.
- Thin slicesAim for about 1/4 inch, from a close-crumbed white sandwich loaf a day old. Fresh bakery bread compresses and gums under a knife; slightly stale bread cuts clean and the crusts trim neatly.
- Assemble to orderThese will not hold. Cut and serve within half an hour, or keep the drained cucumber and the buttered bread separate and build them as needed.
- YieldOne medium cucumber dresses enough filling for six to eight rounds or triangles, which is four sandwiches' worth of bread.
Eva Greene Fuller's Up-to-Date Sandwich Book (1909) subtitled itself as offering four hundred ways to make a sandwich, and its dozens of near-identical numbered variations — four cucumber sandwiches, differing by dressing and garnish — show how the form was catalogued rather than composed. The cucumber sandwich itself is generally traced to English tea tables of the mid-nineteenth century, when glasshouse cultivation made cucumbers available outside high summer and a food valued chiefly for coolness and thinness suited a meal meant to be decorative rather than filling. American books like this one absorbed the idea wholesale into the era of the ladies' luncheon and the card party, where sandwiches were cut small, crusts removed, and made in quantity by someone who needed a numbered list to work from.