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Roast Beef and Tomato Sandwich
Lightly butter thin slices of Boston brown bread, cover with a thin layer of cold roast beef, lightly spread with mayonnaise dressing; put on top of this a slice of tomato, dust with pepper and salt, cover with another slice of bread. Serve on lettuce leaves.
A straightforward assembly sandwich; the only real decisions are the bread and how you handle the tomato.
- Boston brown breadThe steamed rye-and-cornmeal loaf sold in cans, or baked in a coffee tin, is dense, damp and faintly molasses-sweet. It slices thin only when fully cold, and a serrated knife with a sawing stroke beats pressing down. Pumpernickel is the nearest substitute if you have no brown bread.
- Drain the tomatoThis is the hinge. Salt the tomato slice and let it sit on paper towel for five minutes, then pat dry before it goes in; brown bread is porous and absorbs juice fast. The recipe calls for both pepper and salt at this stage, so if you have already salted the tomato, dust with pepper alone rather than salting twice.
- Butter as waterproofingA thin film of butter also helps seal the crumb against mayonnaise and tomato liquid. Have it soft enough to spread without tearing the slice, and take it to the edges.
- The beefCold roast beef sliced against the grain as thinly as you can manage; a single folded layer, not a stack. Leftover roast is the likely source.
- MayonnaisePeriod mayonnaise dressing was made fresh with raw yolk and oil and was looser and sharper than the jarred kind. Commercial mayonnaise works; thin it with a few drops of lemon juice if you want the original's tang.
- Yield and servingFigure two rounds per person for a lunch, one for a tea plate. The lettuce leaf is a serving dish, not a filling, and the sandwich is meant to be eaten within the hour it is made.
Sandwich books were a small publishing genre in America between about 1900 and 1920, when the sandwich moved out of the tavern and into the ladies' luncheon, the card party and the picnic hamper. Books like this one worked as combinatorial catalogues: a fixed list of breads crossed with a fixed list of fillings, each pairing given its own entry and its own name. Boston brown bread earns its place here because the steamed loaf was a New England Saturday-night staple served with baked beans, and cold slices of it were on hand by Sunday; using it as a sandwich bread might best be read as thrift dressed up as novelty. The instruction to serve on lettuce leaves marks the recipe as a company dish rather than a lunch-pail one, of a piece with the doily-lined sandwich plate.