Home › Egg › Epicurean Sandwich
Epicurean Sandwich
Two medium sized tomatoes, three green sweet peppers, and one small onion, chop fine, mix together, salt, and drain in sieve for five minutes. Mix with a little salad dressing and place on a lettuce leaf, between thin slices of white or whole wheat bread lightly buttered.
A raw vegetable relish bound with dressing — essentially a chopped salad served between bread. The whole success of it rests on draining, so the bread does not turn to paste.
- The hinge: drain properlyFive minutes in a sieve is the minimum, not the target. Salt the chopped mixture, let it sit 15-20 minutes, then press gently against the sieve — tomatoes and peppers give up a surprising amount of liquid, and any that stays behind ends up in the bread.
- Seed the tomatoesIf your tomatoes are pulpy and full of juice, halve and scoop out the seed jelly before chopping, and the drained mixture will hold together far better.
- "Green sweet peppers"Ordinary green bell peppers. Three to two tomatoes is a pepper-forward ratio by current taste; two peppers gives a more balanced filling, and a red or yellow one sweetens it considerably.
- "A little salad dressing"In a book of this kind this means mayonnaise or a cooked boiled dressing — vinegar, egg and mustard thickened over heat — not a bottled vinaigrette. Mayonnaise is the closest thing at hand. Add it by the tablespoon: enough to bind, not to pool.
- No egg, despite the sectionThe recipe sits under Egg but calls for none. The link is likely the dressing, which in this period was egg-based; a chopped hard-boiled egg will not hurt if you want the filling to hold.
- Onion restraint"One small onion" raw and finely chopped is assertive in a filling this size. Rinsing the chopped onion in cold water and patting it dry takes the harsh edge off without losing the flavour.
- Bread and butterThe light buttering is functional — it seals the crumb against the damp filling. Do not skip it, and assemble just before serving.
"Epicurean" was one of the great catch-all flatteries of turn-of-the-century American cookery, attached to everything from sauces to canned goods to signal richness and refinement rather than any fixed set of ingredients. Sandwich books proliferated in the first two decades of the twentieth century, driven by the rise of the packed lunch, the afternoon tea and the picnic; publishers issued whole volumes of nothing else, sorted by principal ingredient. The choice offered between white and whole wheat is also of its moment: whole wheat bread was being promoted in this period as the more wholesome option, and sandwich writers often gave readers the option.