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Sandwich (Thin slices of lightly)
On thin slices of lightly buttered white bread, lay a crisp lettuce leaf; on that spread cream cheese, on top of the cheese sprinkle chopped pickled beets.
Cover with another slice of buttered bread.
An assembly job rather than a cooked dish, so the only real variables are the moisture of the beets and the softness of the cheese. Both are worth attention if the sandwich is to survive being carried anywhere.
- Drain the beets hardChopped pickled beets shed brine and will turn buttered bread pink and soggy within minutes. Chop them, then press them in a sieve or blot on paper towel before they go anywhere near the cheese.
- Cream cheese, then and nowIn Fuller's day "cream cheese" often meant a soft fresh curd cheese, closer in texture to Neufchatel than to the stabilised block sold today, though factory-wrapped cream cheese was also on sale by then. Modern block cream cheese works, but let it come to room temperature or beat it with a spoonful of cream so it spreads without tearing the bread.
- The butter is structuralThe thin layer of butter on both slices also works as a moisture barrier. Skip it and the beet juice goes straight into the crumb.
- Order of assemblyLettuce below the cheese, beets above it, as written. The lettuce keeps the wet layer off the bottom slice and the cheese anchors the chopped beets so they do not roll out at the first bite.
- BreadThe recipe calls for thin slices of white bread. A close-grained loaf holds up best; anything with large holes will leak.
- Yield and servingThe instructions make one sandwich. For a tea tray, trim the crusts and cut into four fingers or two triangles; assemble no more than half an hour ahead and keep them covered with a damp cloth.
Eva Greene Fuller's collection belongs to a brief, intense American vogue for the sandwich as a dish in its own right rather than a way of using up cold roast. Between roughly 1890 and 1920 the sandwich became the mainstay of the ladies' luncheon, the card party and the church social, and books like this one catalogued hundreds of fillings in a few lines each, on the assumption that the reader needed ideas rather than technique. Cream cheese appears again and again in these pages because it bound almost anything chopped fine -- nuts, olives, dates, pimiento, and here pickled beets. The combination is a fair snapshot of the period's palate: something soft and bland, something sharp and vinegary, and a leaf of lettuce for crispness, all on white bread with the crusts often cut away.