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Green Cheese Sandwich
Spread on thin slices of lightly buttered white bread, green cheese grated fine. Put slices together and garnish with a sour pickle.
A three-line sandwich that depends entirely on knowing what "green cheese" meant in 1909. Get the cheese right and the rest follows.
- What green cheese isIn American cookbooks of this period "green cheese" often means sapsago (Swiss Schabziger), a hard, skim-milk cheese tinted and scented green with blue melilot and sold as a cone for grating. The term could also be used of a fresh, unripened cheese, so the reading is an inference rather than a certainty; it does not mean Christmas-colored cheddar.
- SubstitutionsSapsago is still imported and sold in specialty shops; if you cannot find it, a dry aged pecorino or a hard ricotta salata grated fine gives the right texture, though not the herbal note. Do not use a soft cheese: the recipe relies on a dry grating cheese that will not slide out of the sandwich.
- Grate very fineThis is the hinge. Sapsago is intensely salty and pungent, so it is used as a seasoning rather than a filling. A rasp-style grater giving a fluffy powder spreads thinly and evenly; coarse shreds make the sandwich harsh in some bites and empty in others.
- Butter is structural"Lightly buttered" is not decoration. The butter is what holds the dry grated cheese to the bread, so soften it properly and spread to the edges. Cheese scattered on unbuttered bread simply falls out when cut.
- BreadThin slices of a close-crumbed white sandwich loaf, cut thinner than you would for a modern sandwich; the recipe says only "thin." A firm day-old loaf slices thinner without tearing.
- Yield and servingTwo slices make one sandwich. Books of this kind were generally aimed at tea-table service, so the sandwich is plausibly trimmed and cut into halves or fingers, though this recipe does not say so.
- The pickle"Sour pickle" here means a salt-and-vinegar cucumber pickle, not a sweet gherkin. Its acidity is doing real work against the salt of the cheese, so keep it and serve it on the plate rather than inside.
The Up-to-Date Sandwich Book belongs to the brief American vogue, roughly 1900 to 1920, for the sandwich as a formal course — dainty, crustless, endlessly varied, and served at teas, card parties and luncheons rather than carried to work. Books of this kind were essentially catalogues: a hostess wanted twenty fillings that looked different on a platter, and the recipes are short because there was nothing to explain beyond the combination. Sapsago is one plausible candidate for the cheese in question. A hard green Swiss cheese flavored with dried blue melilot, it reached American groceries as an import and was valued precisely because it grated to a fine, oddly colored powder — useful when the whole point of the table was contrast. Recipes calling for "green cheese" in this era are sometimes read as sapsago, though the identification is uncertain.