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Cucumber Sandwich
Peel cucumbers and cut into the thinnest possible slices and sprinkle with salt and pepper and a few drops of lemon juice. Place between thin slices of lightly buttered bread.
A four-line recipe whose success rests entirely on how the cucumber is handled between slicing and serving. Two small adjustments keep the bread from turning to paste.
- Salt, then drainSliced cucumber sheds a surprising amount of water once salted. Letting the slices sit in a colander for 15-20 minutes and blotting them dry before they touch the bread is a modern safeguard; the recipe says nothing about it, and salts the slices immediately before assembly.
- Thinnest possible slicesA mandoline or the slicing blade of a food processor gives the 1/16-inch slices the text is after. Hand-cut rounds are usually too thick and slide out of the sandwich.
- Cucumber varietiesOlder cucumber varieties were generally thicker-skinned and seedier than modern salad types, which is the likely reason for the instruction to peel. English or Persian cucumbers need no peeling and have far less seed core, which also means less water to drain off.
- Butter as waterproofing"Lightly buttered" is doing structural work here. Softened butter spread edge to edge seals the crumb against the remaining moisture, so do not skip it or substitute a wet spread.
- The breadThe recipe specifies only 'thin slices of lightly buttered bread'; thin white sandwich bread with the crusts trimmed is the usual modern tea-sandwich treatment, though the text does not say so. Chill the loaf briefly and it will cut thinner without tearing.
- Holding timeThese are meant to be eaten within an hour or two. If made ahead, stack them on a tray, cover with a barely damp cloth and then plastic, and refrigerate no more than a few hours.
- YieldOne medium cucumber dresses roughly 8 to 10 rounds of bread, or about 16 to 20 small tea sandwiches once quartered.
Cucumber sandwiches belong to the late-Victorian and Edwardian tea table, where they signalled leisure as much as appetite: cucumbers were often grown under glass, wanted careful handling, and offered almost no nourishment, which suited a meal taken between luncheon and dinner. The form given here -- a whisper of seasoning, thin buttered bread -- is the one that became standard, and it appears in American sandwich books alongside far heartier fillings for lunch boxes and picnics. The instruction to peel is a reminder that the smooth, thin-skinned salad cucumber of the supermarket is a later arrival; older varieties were tougher-skinned and could be bitter near the stem end.