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Piccalilli Sandwich
Between thinly cut slices of lightly buttered white bread, place a layer of sweet piccalilli; cut in diamond shape. Garnish with a sprig of parsley.
A three-line assembly recipe from a book that assumed the cook already had a jar of pickle in the cellar. Nearly all the work is in the piccalilli and in keeping the bread dry.
- Drain the relish hardThis is the hinge. Sweet piccalilli sits in a thin syrupy brine that will soak through a thin slice of white bread in minutes. Tip it into a sieve, press gently, and let it drain for ten minutes before spreading.
- Butter both facesThe butter is not for flavour here, it is a moisture barrier. Have it soft enough to spread in an unbroken film right to the crust edge; the recipe's 'lightly buttered' slices means both inner surfaces.
- What piccalilli meantIn American books of this period piccalilli is a chopped sweet mustard pickle, usually green tomato, cabbage, onion and pepper in a sweetened vinegar with mustard and turmeric. British piccalilli is a different thing: cauliflower and onion in a thick mustard sauce, and it works, but it is sharper and much less sweet.
- "Thinly cut"Before commercially sliced bread this meant a day-old close-crumbed white loaf cut thin by hand. A firm sandwich loaf cut thin is the modern equivalent; anything airy will tear under the relish.
- Cut in diamond shapeTrim the crusts and cut into diamonds with parallel diagonal cuts crossing each other. The recipe gives no yield or number of servings.
- HoldingAssemble within an hour of serving. Cover with a barely damp cloth over waxed paper or plastic, not directly on the bread, and keep cool. The parsley sprig goes on at the last moment.
Piccalilli reached English kitchens from the Indian trade in the eighteenth century as "India pickle," a turmeric-and-mustard preserve of hard vegetables, and the name is generally traced to that period rather than to any single cook. By the time this book appeared, American home canners had reworked it into a sweet chopped relish built around green tomatoes, which gave the late-summer garden somewhere to go. Sandwich books of the 1900s existed to solve the problem of the afternoon tea, the card party and the picnic basket, and a shelf-stable pickle between buttered bread was exactly the kind of filling they prized: no cooking, no carving, nothing to spoil in a warm room, and a bright colour that showed well cut into diamonds on a plate.