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Dutch Lunch Sandwich
Take two square salted crackers and place on one two thin slices of Bermuda onion, next a layer of sardines and squeeze a generous amount of lemon juice over all; then put remaining cracker (buttered) on top. Salmon may be substituted.
A cracker sandwich of the beer-garden sort, assembled rather than cooked. The only real decisions are the onion and the cracker.
- Square salted crackersSoda crackers of the period were often sold in bulk from a barrel and were generally larger and sturdier, less flaky, than a modern saltine. Two saltines may struggle under sardines and lemon juice; a thicker cracker such as a common cracker, a water biscuit, or a saltine-style cracker sold as "snack squares" is a closer match.
- Bermuda onionA large, flat, mild sweet onion once shipped from Bermuda and later grown in Texas. Vidalia, Walla Walla, or any sweet white onion stands in. Slice paper-thin on a mandoline or the sandwich becomes an onion sandwich with sardines on it.
- SardinesMost likely a flat tin of sardines packed in oil, skin and bones intact. Drain them well before laying them on the cracker, or the oil plus lemon juice will soften the base quickly. Bones and skin are edible.
- The lemon"A generous amount" is not specified; a teaspoon or so per sandwich is a reasonable reading. Its work is cutting the oil and the onion, and the recipe has it go on before the top cracker.
- Butter on the lid onlyThe recipe butters the top cracker rather than the bottom; no reason is given. Softened, not melted.
- Salmon substitutionPresumably tinned salmon; drain and flake it rather than laying it in fillets, and it may want more lemon and a little salt, being blander than sardine.
- Yield and timingOne sandwich per set of two crackers. Assemble to order and eat immediately; these do not hold, travel, or sit on a platter.
"Dutch lunch" was American saloon and picnic vocabulary around 1900 for a cold spread of cheese, sausage, pickles, onion, rye bread and beer, the "Dutch" generally traced to the usual English mangling of Deutsch and taken to point at German-American drinking rooms rather than the Netherlands. The pairing here of tinned fish, raw sweet onion and a plain cracker is that spread in miniature, and it belongs to the moment when canned sardines had become cheap enough to be an everyday larder item in ordinary households. Sandwich books of the era ran to hundreds of such combinations; the point was something that could be put together at once for cards, a picnic hamper, or a late supper without lighting the stove.