Sandwiches
Chop four boiled eggs very fine, season with pepper and salt and spread on thin slices of lightly buttered white bread; on top of eggs place three pickled oysters; over this spread a tablespoonful of curry sauce and cover with another slice of bread. The sauce is made thus; put a tablespoonful of butter into a sauce pan, add a cup of milk, thicken with a little flour dissolved in a little cold milk, let come to a boil, then add a dash of onion juice, salt and pepper, and a teaspoonful of curry. Let simmer a minute, then set it aside to cool. When sandwiches are ready to serve, spread this sauce over the egg and oysters, then cover with the other slice of bread. Garnish with parsley.
A composed tea sandwich rather than a lunchbox one: three separate elements assembled at the last minute. The sauce is a small béchamel and the whole thing lives or dies on how thick you let it get.
- Make the sauce thickA cup of milk with a tablespoon of butter and only "a little flour" gives a pouring sauce that will soak straight through thin bread. Use about 2 tablespoons flour to the cup of milk so it sets to a spreadable paste as it cools, closer to a thick bread sauce than a gravy.
- Cool it completelyThe instruction to set it aside to cool is the hinge of the recipe. Warm sauce steams the bread and slackens the egg; the sandwiches should be built with sauce at room temperature or cooler.
- Curry powder, not pasteA teaspoonful of curry in a recipe of this period means dry yellow curry powder of the mild Anglo-Indian sort. Modern powders vary widely in heat; taste the sauce and adjust before cooling, since you cannot correct it once it is on the bread.
- Onion juiceGrate half a small onion on a fine grater and use the liquid that collects, or press grated onion through a sieve. A quarter teaspoon is a dash. Grated onion pulp itself will make the sauce gritty.
- Pickled oystersOnce a common shop item, oysters poached in their liquor then steeped in spiced vinegar. Jarred smoked or pickled oysters are the nearest thing on a modern shelf; drain them well and blot dry, or the vinegar will thin the sauce.
- Bread and butterWhite sandwich bread cut thin, crusts off, and buttered right to the edges. The butter is a moisture barrier as much as a seasoning, so it needs to be soft enough to spread in a continuous film.
- YieldFour eggs will build roughly six to eight rounds, each cut into halves or quarters for a tea tray. Assemble no more than a few minutes before serving.
Pickled oysters were a staple of American cold tables through the nineteenth century, sold by the keg and the jar in coastal cities and shipped inland; they turn up in sandwich, salad and canape recipes long after fresh oysters became a restaurant food. The curry sauce belongs to the same moment: commercial curry powder had been a British pantry item since the late eighteenth century and an American one by the early nineteenth, and by the turn of the twentieth century it was often less a gesture toward Indian cooking than a standard way of making a white sauce interesting. Sandwich books of this period exist because the afternoon tea, the card party and the railway journey all demanded food that could be made in advance and eaten off a plate on the knee, and the genre rewards exactly this kind of layered, faintly extravagant assembly.