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Mushroom Sandwich
Boiled mushrooms chopped fine, cold boiled tongue chopped fine, season with pepper and salt, add a little mayonnaise dressing, mix, and spread between thin slices of buttered white bread. Garnish with an olive.
A two-ingredient spread with no quantities given, which is typical of sandwich books of this era — the cook was expected to judge by eye. A few decisions are left to you.
- ProportionsNothing is specified. Equal volumes of chopped mushroom and chopped tongue works, with the mushrooms slightly dominant if you want the flavour forward. About 1 cup of the mixture fills four to six thin sandwiches.
- Boiled mushroomsBoiling is one of several period methods, and it leaves them waterlogged. Drain them well and press out the liquid in a towel before chopping, or the mayonnaise will thin and the bread will go soggy within the hour.
- Use cultivated mushroomsGathered field mushrooms were still in use alongside cultivated ones at this date. Buy cultivated white or cremini rather than foraging; the poisonous look-alikes are a real risk and no recipe of this vintage will warn you about them.
- Cold boiled tongueBeef tongue, simmered whole for three hours or so, peeled, pressed and chilled — a standard cold-larder staple then, rarer now. Delis and Latin American butchers still sell it cooked. Failing that, a mild cured ham or good bologna gives a comparable salty, dense counterweight, though the texture is coarser.
- MayonnaisePeriod mayonnaise was made to order with raw yolk and was looser and sharper than the jarred kind. Commercial mayonnaise works; add it a spoonful at a time, only enough to bind, since an over-wet filling will collapse thin bread.
- The breadThin slices means genuinely thin — a close-grained white sandwich loaf, buttered edge to edge to seal the crumb against the filling. Butter first, spread second, and trim the crusts if you are serving these as tea sandwiches.
- ServingMake them close to the time they will be eaten. Cut into triangles or fingers, spear a green olive on a pick, and keep covered with a damp cloth if they must wait even twenty minutes.
Eva Greene Fuller's The Up-To-Date Sandwich Book (1909) collected several hundred fillings at the moment the sandwich was moving from a tavern snack to the centrepiece of the ladies' luncheon and the afternoon card party. Tongue is the tell: cold pressed tongue was cheap, useful for days, and sliced thin for the cold table. Mushrooms carried the opposite association, faintly luxurious and until the late nineteenth century mostly gathered rather than grown. Commercial mushroom cultivation in cellars and caves was expanding in the United States and Britain around this period, which is one reason mushrooms turn up so freely in cookbooks of the 1900s where earlier books treated them as an occasional relish. The two are bound with mayonnaise on white bread and finished with a single olive: something rich, something salty, something green on top.