Gold Sandwich
Rub the yolks of three hard-boiled eggs to a paste. Add two tablespoonfuls of olive oil, mixing with a silver fork. Add a pinch of mustard, cayenne pepper and salt, and lastly one tablespoonful of vinegar. When this is thoroughly mixed, add one cup of grated American cheese. Spread on thin slices of lightly buttered white bread.
A cooked-yolk mayonnaise stiffened with cheese, which is what gives the spread its color and its name. The whole thing succeeds or fails on how the oil goes in.
- Add the oil slowlyWork the two tablespoons of olive oil into the mashed yolks a few drops at a time, as for a mayonnaise. Dumped in at once it will slick out of the paste and the spread turns greasy rather than creamy.
- The silver forkOld cookbooks routinely specified silver for anything acidic, the usual complaint being that iron or steel utensils discoloured and left a metallic taste in vinegar and lemon mixtures. Any stainless fork, or a small bowl and a wooden spoon, does the same job.
- "American cheese"In this period the term meant domestic factory cheddar sold in wheels, firm enough to grate on a box grater. Use a medium or sharp cheddar; modern processed slices will not grate and will not behave the same way.
- MustardA pinch means dry mustard powder, not prepared mustard from a jar. If you substitute prepared mustard, cut the vinegar back, since it already contains acid.
- Proportions run dryOne cup of grated cheese to three yolks and two tablespoons of oil gives a stiff, crumbly paste. A teaspoon more oil, or a little softened butter, brings it to spreading consistency without loosening the flavor.
- The leftover whitesThree whites are left over. Chopped fine and folded back in they make a coarser but perfectly good filling, though the color stops being gold.
- YieldEnough for six to eight thin sandwiches, cut in triangles or fingers as tea sandwiches. Best mixed and used the same day; refrigeration firms the cheese and the paste needs to come back to room temperature before it will spread.
Sandwich books were a small publishing genre in the early decades of the twentieth century, tied to the rise of the ladies' luncheon, the afternoon tea and the club buffet, where thin crustless bread and a filling that could be made ahead solved the problem of feeding a crowd without a hot kitchen. Fanciful names were part of the appeal: a filling was sold on its color as much as its taste, and "gold" here simply means hard-boiled yolk and yellow cheddar. The technique underneath is older than the fashion for sandwiches. A paste of cooked yolks beaten with oil, vinegar and mustard is the cooked-yolk dressing found throughout nineteenth-century American and English cookery, used long before bottled mayonnaise made it unnecessary, and it is more forgiving than a raw-yolk emulsion because it cannot break in the same way.