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Sandwich (Chop three medium sized)
Chop three medium sized cucumbers and one red pepper, add a little mayonnaise dressing, and place between thin slices of lightly buttered white bread.
A tea sandwich that depends almost entirely on how much water you get out of the cucumbers before they meet the bread. Everything else is assembly.
- Drain the cucumbers firstPeel, seed and chop, then toss with a little salt and leave in a sieve 20-30 minutes, pressing gently at the end. Chopped cucumber dressed straight into mayonnaise will weep and the bread will be sodden within minutes.
- "One red pepper" is ambiguousIn American books of this period "red pepper" often meant cayenne, but here it is counted and chopped as a whole vegetable alongside three cucumbers, which points to a sweet red pod or a canned pimiento rather than a hot chile. A whole pepper against three cucumbers is a lot of pepper; half a small one, finely chopped, gives a gentler balance.
- Mayonnaise dressingThe original assumed a household mayonnaise made fresh from raw yolks and oil. Commercial mayonnaise, made with pasteurised egg, behaves the same here; use it sparingly, just enough to bind, or the filling slumps.
- Season itThe instruction gives no salt or acid beyond the dressing. Cucumber is bland once drained, so it needs salt, a grind of pepper and a few drops of lemon or vinegar to read as anything at all.
- The bread"thin" is not defined; about 1/4 inch from a close-crumbed white loaf is a reasonable working thickness, buttered lightly right to the edges. The butter is structural as much as seasoning: it slows moisture soaking into the crumb. Tea sandwiches of this kind were commonly served with the crusts off and cut into fingers or triangles, though the recipe does not say so.
- Yield and timingThree cucumbers make a generous quantity of filling, enough for a plateful of small tea sandwiches. Fill them within an hour of serving and keep them covered with a damp cloth in the refrigerator; they do not hold overnight.
Cucumber sandwiches belong to the late nineteenth-century tea table, where the point was delicacy rather than sustenance: thin bread, crusts off, a filling that tasted cool and faintly of nothing much. Compilations like this one appeared when the sandwich was still a novelty item worth a whole book. The presence of mayonnaise is a useful reminder that mayonnaise was then a made thing, whisked at home from yolks and oil and understood as an egg dish, not a jar bought ready-made. The addition of chopped red pepper is the American touch, and pimientos, said to have arrived in cans from Spain and later grown in Georgia, turn up constantly in sandwich and salad recipes of the period for colour as much as flavour.