French Sandwich
To one pint of cold cooked fish, add two hardboiled eggs chopped fine, two tablespoonfuls of capers, and a little mayonnaise to moisten. Mix and spread on thin slices of lightly buttered white bread, cover with another slice, and cut in strips. Add a sprinkling of finely chopped cress to the top of each sandwich; rub the yolk of a hard-boiled egg through a sieve and chop the white very fine. Add a sprinkling of the yolk to the cress on half the number of sandwiches, adding the white to the other half. Then arrange them in groups of twos, one of each color on the serving plate. Any cold meat may be used instead of the fish.
A tea-table sandwich built on leftovers, with a decorative finish that does most of the work. The filling is simple; the fussiness is all in the garnish.
- A pint of fishThe original measures by volume, not weight: a pint of flaked cooked fish is roughly 10-12 oz, or the yield of about a pound of raw fillet. Salmon, halibut, cod and haddock all suit it; well-drained canned fish will also serve.
- Moisten, do not drown"A little mayonnaise" means two to three tablespoons at most. A wet filling soaks thin bread within minutes, and these are meant to be cut into strips and stood on a plate.
- Season itThe recipe gives no salt, pepper or acid, which is typical of the period. Cold cooked fish is bland; salt, a grind of pepper and a squeeze of lemon make the difference, and the caper brine can be used instead of lemon.
- CressGarden cress or watercress, both sold in the period as "cress." Use the leaves only, chopped fine and dry, or they will bleed into the mayonnaise and wilt on the plate.
- The sieved egg garnishPushing hard-boiled yolk through a fine sieve gives the fluffy yellow crumb sometimes called mimosa. Do it just before serving; sieved yolk dries and hardens quickly, and the whites should be chopped very fine or they will not cling.
- The breadThin slices of a close-crumbed white loaf, a day old, cut better than fresh. Butter to the edges before filling, which seals the crumb against the mayonnaise.
- Yield and servingA pint of filling makes about twelve rounds of sandwiches, cut into three or four strips each, so roughly forty pieces. Assemble no more than an hour ahead, cover with a damp cloth and refrigerate, and keep a fish-and-mayonnaise filling cold until it goes out.
Sandwich books were a small publishing industry in the first decades of the twentieth century, when afternoon tea, card parties and "luncheons" created steady demand for small, cold, decorative food that could be made from what was already in the larder. The label "French" here signals no French origin so much as the presence of mayonnaise and capers, which American cookbooks of the period seem often to have treated as markers of French cooking; dishes named French in these books may well have earned the name from a sauce rather than a source. The sieved-yolk-and-chopped-white finish is a garnish still called mimosa, after the yellow blossom, and the instruction to alternate yellow and white sandwiches in pairs on the plate is pure period table styling, where the visual arrangement of a plate mattered as much as the filling. The closing line, that any cold meat may be used instead, is the honest heart of the recipe: this is a leftovers formula dressed for company.