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Sandwich (Run a sour cucumber pickle)
Run a sour cucumber pickle through the meat Mix chopper, then run through six hard-boiled eggs. with a little mayonnaise dressing. Place mixture between thin slices of lightly buttered white bread with a crisp lettuce leaf between.
A short pickle-and-egg salad filling, typical of the terse style of early sandwich books: no quantities for the dressing, no seasoning, no yield. A few points make it workable.
- The garbled lineThe first sentence has been scrambled in typesetting — the word "Mix" belongs at the head of the second sentence. Read it as: run the pickle through the meat chopper, then the eggs; mix with a little mayonnaise.
- Meat chopperA hand-cranked grinder clamped to the table, which produced a coarse, uneven mince rather than a paste. A few pulses in a food processor is the closest equivalent, but stopping short of smooth matters here; the filling should still have texture.
- Sour cucumber pickleA brine-fermented cucumber, not a sweet gherkin. No size is given; a whole full-sour or half-sour dill of roughly 3-4 inches is a reasonable scale against six eggs.
- Drain the pickleThe hinge of the recipe. Ground pickle sheds a surprising amount of brine; press it in a sieve or squeeze it in a towel before mixing, or the filling will loosen and soak through the bread within the hour.
- Mayonnaise quantity"A little" is genuinely unspecified. Start with about 3 tablespoons for six eggs and add only enough to bind — a wet mixture will not stay between thin slices.
- SeasoningNone is called for; the pickle would carry some salt on its own. Taste and add salt and pepper, and mustard if you want it.
- Assembly and yieldSix eggs make roughly 1½ cups of filling, enough for six to eight sandwiches on thin-cut white bread. Butter both slices — it is a moisture barrier as much as a flavouring — and add the lettuce only at serving time.
Sandwich books were a small publishing genre from the 1890s onward, in a period when the sandwich had moved from tavern food to the tea table, the club luncheon and the picnic basket, and readers were often assumed to want variety rather than instruction. That accounts for the compression here: the reader is assumed to know how to hard-boil an egg and make mayonnaise, so the entry does little more than name the combination. The chopped egg and pickle filling belongs to the same family as the era's countless "salad" sandwiches, built around whatever could be run through the meat chopper and bound with dressing. The insistence on thin, lightly buttered white bread with a crisp lettuce leaf is the mark of the dainty tea sandwich rather than a working lunch, the butter keeping the bread from damp, the lettuce for contrast against a soft filling.