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Lettuce Sandwich No. 2
Cut crisp lettuce leaves into ribbons with scissors, add a dash of mayonnaise dressing, and season with salt. Place between thin slices of lightly buttered white or brown bread.
A tea sandwich with almost nothing to it, which means the few decisions in it carry all the weight.
- Butter both facesThe butter is not for flavor here; it seals the crumb against the dressing and the lettuce's own water. Have it soft enough to spread thin without tearing the bread, and cover the slice to the edges.
- Ribbons, not choppedScissors through stacked, dried leaves give clean strands that lie flat. Chopped lettuce bruises and weeps, which makes for a soggy sandwich.
- Dry the leaves thoroughlyCrisp is doing real work in this recipe. Spin or towel the lettuce completely dry, or the dressing thins and soaks through the bread.
- "A dash" of dressingRoughly a teaspoon of mayonnaise per sandwich, enough to coat the ribbons rather than bind them. More and the filling slides out when cut.
- Mayonnaise dressingIn 1909 this would generally have been mayonnaise made at home from raw yolks and oil, or a boiled cooked dressing; jarred commercial mayonnaise was not yet widely available. Any commercial mayonnaise stands in directly; if you make your own and plan to hold the sandwiches, use pasteurized eggs.
- The breadThin slices suggests about a quarter inch from a close-crumbed sandwich loaf. The recipe does not call for trimming the crusts, though it is usual for tea sandwiches; chilling the loaf briefly makes thin slicing much easier.
- Timing and yieldAssemble no more than an hour ahead, cover with a barely damp towel, and refrigerate. A dozen sandwiches cut in quarters serves eight to ten alongside other food.
Eva Greene Fuller's The Up-To-Date Sandwich Book (1909) collects several hundred fillings from an era often said to be the one in which the sandwich became respectable at the tea table rather than merely portable food for laborers and travelers, though tea sandwiches were established Victorian practice well before. The lettuce sandwich is the plainest thing in the book and also one of the most telling: mayonnaise was the fashionable dressing of American cookery at the turn of the century.