Lenten Sandwich
Whip a cup of cream until stiff, stir in minced cold shrimp, a little parsley, a dash of salt and pepper. Spread mixture between thin slices of white or graham bread. Garnish with an olive.
A tea sandwich rather than a lunch sandwich: whipped cream stands in for mayonnaise, which means the filling is soft, unstable and meant to be eaten within the hour. The proportions are left entirely to the cook.
- QuantitiesA cup of cream whips to roughly two cups. For a filling that tastes of shrimp rather than dairy, use about 6-8 oz of cooked, peeled shrimp, minced, to that volume — the original gives no ratio at all.
- Use heavy creamCream of about 36 percent butterfat (US "heavy cream") holds best once shrimp and salt are folded in; lighter whipping cream will whip but softens faster. Ultra-pasteurized cream whips but weeps sooner; chill the bowl and beaters and stop at firm peaks, not grainy ones.
- Fold, do not stirThe instruction to "stir in" the shrimp will collapse the cream. Fold the minced shrimp and parsley through with a spatula in a few strokes.
- Cold shrimp"cold shrimp" here means shrimp already boiled and cooled; canned shrimp was also available at the time. Use cooked shrimp, drained and patted dry — wet shrimp will thin the cream into soup.
- Graham breadGraham bread is a soft loaf made with coarse whole-wheat (graham) flour, closer to a modern wholemeal sandwich loaf than to a graham cracker. Either bread should be sliced thin and, for tea sandwiches, crusts trimmed.
- Assemble lateWhipped-cream fillings soak into bread quickly. Make these no more than about half an hour before serving and keep them covered with a damp cloth in the refrigerator; they do not hold overnight.
- SeasoningCream mutes salt considerably. Season the filling, taste it on a scrap of bread, then correct — a little lemon juice, though not in the original, keeps it from tasting flat.
- YieldRoughly 10-12 finger sandwiches, or 5-6 whole ones. The olive is a garnish on the plate or a slice pressed on top, not a filling ingredient.
Sandwich books were a small publishing genre in the first decades of the twentieth century, when the afternoon tea table and the ladies' luncheon created steady demand for something dainty to hand round. The "Lenten" label marks it as one of the meatless fillings a Catholic or Episcopalian hostess could serve on a Friday or on the other days of Lent when abstinence was observed, when fish and shellfish were permitted but flesh meat was not. Shrimp had become widely available in cans by this period, which is what makes a recipe calling casually for "cold shrimp" plausible in an inland American kitchen. The whipped cream in place of mayonnaise is often said to be characteristic of the era's tea sandwiches, which are generally described as prizing pale colors and a soft mouthful over anything robust.