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Sandwich (Slice white bread very thin)
Slice white bread very thin, when you have pared off the crust. Butter smoothly and lightly. Spread one slice with cream cheese and lay upon the other a crisp lettuce leaf that has been dipped in mayonnaise dressing. Put slices together. Garnish with an olive.
A tea sandwich in the plainest sense: two thin slices, a soft cheese, a dressed leaf. Everything depends on the bread being thin enough and the cheese soft enough to spread without tearing it.
- Soften the cheese firstCream cheese straight from the refrigerator will drag and shred thin bread. Let an 8 oz block come to room temperature, then beat it smooth with a fork or a splash of cream until it spreads like butter.
- What "cream cheese" meantIn American books of this period the term could cover both the modern block cheese and any fresh unripened soft cheese of the Neufchatel type. Either works; the softer, higher-moisture cheeses spread more kindly.
- Cutting the bread thinA day-old close-crumbed white loaf slices far thinner than a fresh one. Trim the crusts after assembling rather than before if you want clean square edges, though the original does it first and either order is fine.
- Butter is not optionalThe thin film of butter seals the crumb against the mayonnaise and the moisture in the lettuce. Skip it and the bread goes limp quickly.
- Dipping the lettuceDip and then shake or blot the leaf; a dripping leaf will soak straight through. Use the crisp inner leaves of a head lettuce, torn to fit the slice, not a whole outer leaf that will slide out on the first bite.
- MayonnaiseMayonnaise of the period was typically made fresh with raw yolk. A commercial jarred mayonnaise serves the same purpose and keeps, which matters if the sandwiches are to sit on a tea table.
- The oliveA pitted green olive on a short pick, set on top or beside the sandwich. Cut the assembled sandwich into halves or fingers first, then garnish.
- Yield and holdingReckon two to three small sandwiches per person at tea. They can be made an hour ahead if covered with a damp cloth or wrap and kept cool; beyond that the lettuce weeps.
Eva Greene Fuller's collection belongs to the brief, intense American vogue for the sandwich as a genteel food rather than a laborer's dinner. Between roughly 1890 and 1920 the crustless, thin-cut sandwich became standard at afternoon teas, card parties and church socials, and small books appeared cataloguing fillings by the hundred. Cream cheese was central to the genre: bland, spreadable and by then widely available in factory-made bricks after several decades of commercial production in New York State. The olive is the period's signature flourish, the same garnish that turns up on relish trays and in the era's cocktails.