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Mosaic Sandwich (Cut two slices each of white)
Cut two slices each of white and dark graham bread; cream one-quarter cup of butter until white.
Spread a slice of white bread with the creamed butter, then place a slice of graham bread on it; then spread graham bread with creamed butter; repeat. Place a light weight on all four slices. When butter hardens remove the weight, then cut in thin slices downward.
A tea-table trick rather than a dish: two breads of contrasting color, glued together with butter and chilled until the block cuts cleanly. Success depends almost entirely on the bread and the chilling.
- Graham breadGraham flour is coarsely ground whole wheat, including the bran and germ. A dense whole-wheat sandwich loaf is the closest supermarket equivalent; the point is color contrast, so avoid anything with visible seeds or large holes.
- Bread must be day-old and squaredFresh bread tears and compresses unevenly. Use a firm, close-grained pullman-style loaf a day old, and trim the crusts from the assembled block after chilling rather than before, so the layers stay aligned.
- Creaming the butterA quarter cup is half a stick. Beat it at cool room temperature until pale and spreadable but not melted; softened-to-greasy butter soaks into the crumb and will not set up into the mortar the recipe depends on.
- The weight and the chillThis is the hinge. Wrap the four-slice stack tightly and press it under a light weight, a small cutting board or a plate, in the refrigerator for at least an hour. The butter has to harden solid or the slices shear apart on the knife.
- Cutting downwardSlice through the stack perpendicular to the layers with a long thin knife, wiping the blade between cuts. Each slice comes out striped, four bands of alternating color, about a quarter inch thick.
- Getting an actual mosaicAs written this yields striped ribbon slices rather than a checkerboard. Some versions go a step further: the striped slices are buttered, stacked again with the stripes reversed, chilled a second time and sliced across the new block.
- YieldFour slices of bread give a small plateful of thin ribbon sandwiches, enough for two or three people at tea. Scale up in blocks of four slices.
- Holding themCut slices dry out fast at the edges. Keep them under a barely damp cloth in the refrigerator and bring them out at the last moment.
Ribbon, checkerboard and mosaic sandwiches belong to the era of the afternoon tea and the bridge luncheon, when a hostess was judged partly on how decorative her sandwich plate looked; Eva Greene Fuller's Up-to-Date Sandwich Book (1909) collects hundreds of these small constructions, the purely ornamental ones among them. The effect depends on a genuinely two-toned bread supply, which the period had: graham bread, named for Sylvester Graham, the antebellum dietary reformer who preached coarse unbolted wheat flour, had by 1900 lost most of its moral freight and become simply the brown loaf on the shelf beside the white.