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Pâté De Foie Gras Sandwich No. 2
Three slices of white or brown bread lightly buttered; on the lower slice spread pâté de foie gras, then put another slice of bread on top of that. Cover with delicate shreds of tomato, tiny lettuce hearts with a dash of mayonnaise dressing, topped by a third slice of bread. Garnish with an olive.
A three-decker club-style sandwich from the era when pâté came in tins and sandwiches were cut for tea trays. Almost nothing here needs conversion, but a few assumptions in the original are worth making explicit.
- The hinge: cold everythingBoth the pâté and the mayonnaise depend on being cold and firm. Chill the pâté until it spreads without smearing and assemble just before serving, or the tomato weeps into the bread and the middle slice collapses.
- What the pâté actually isAround 1900 "pâté de foie gras" in a household kitchen would most often have been an imported tinned or potted goose-liver preparation, sometimes truffled and generally well salted. Modern mousse de foie or a smooth duck-liver parfait behaves the same way on bread; a coarse country pâté does not, since it will not spread in a thin even layer.
- Tomato shreds"Delicate shreds" means thin strips rather than rounds. Seed the tomato first and blot the strips dry, otherwise the second slice of bread turns to paste before the sandwich reaches the table.
- Lettuce heartsThe small pale inner leaves of a butterhead or a Little Gem. They are crisp enough to carry a little dressing without wilting, which suits the sandwich.
- Bread and butterWhite or brown bread, best cut thin here. The recipe asks only that the slices be lightly buttered, but butter acts as a moisture barrier as much as a flavouring, which matters in a sandwich with tomato and mayonnaise in it.
- Yield and cuttingOne sandwich per person as written; for a tea plate, trim the crusts and quarter it, spearing each quarter with a pick so the three layers hold. The olive is simply a garnish.
Foie gras arrived in Anglo-American kitchens chiefly as an import — the tinned or potted terrines of Strasbourg and Périgord were a staple luxury of late nineteenth-century grocers, expensive but shelf-stable, which is exactly why they turn up in sandwich books rather than in the roast-meat chapters. Sandwich collections like this one proliferated around 1900 alongside the growth of afternoon tea and, it is often said, other occasions that wanted food eaten off a small plate with no knife. The three-slice construction is the same idea as the club sandwich, which is generally traced to American clubhouses and hotel dining rooms of the 1890s; here it is scaled down and made genteel, with the second slice of bread separating a rich liver spread from a fresh salad layer so that neither overwhelms the other.