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School Sandwich
On thin slices of lightly buttered white bread, spread brown sugar; cover with another slice of bread and wrap in wax paper.
Two ingredients and no cooking, but the details decide whether this holds together in a lunch bag or arrives as a bag of crumbs and loose sugar.
- Butter both slicesThe recipe calls for lightly buttered bread but does not say whether the covering slice is buttered too. Butter both facing surfaces at room temperature so the sugar has something to grip on either side; an unbuttered top slice lets the sugar sift straight through the crumb.
- Which brown sugarAt the time this was written that meant a soft, moist, fairly dark sugar. Modern light or dark brown sugar works, but press it flat with the back of a spoon rather than sprinkling it loose; packed sugar sets slightly against the butter and stops shifting.
- The bread mattersThin slices of a close-crumbed white loaf suit this best. An open, airy artisan loaf lets the sugar fall through the holes.
- Wax paperStill sold and still the right wrapper here, since it holds the sandwich firm without sweating it. Plastic wrap or a sealed box traps moisture, which can dampen the sugar toward syrup.
- Make it the same morningLeft overnight the sugar draws moisture from the butter and bread and the filling liquefies. These are a morning job.
- YieldAs written, one sandwich per two slices. A standard loaf gives about ten.
Sandwich books proliferated in the first decades of the twentieth century, when the packed lunch became a fixture of American life: children carried a midday meal to consolidated schools, and clerks and factory hands ate away from home. A whole class of "school" or "lunch box" sandwiches emerged, judged less on flavor than on whether they survived several hours wrapped in paper. Brown sugar on buttered bread belongs to an older domestic habit of treating sugar itself as the filling, of a piece with sugar sandwiches, jam-and-butter and the buttered bread sprinkled with cinnamon sugar that turns up across British and Northern European kitchens. The wax paper is the modern touch here; commercially produced waxed paper was becoming a common household item around this period, one of several wrappeared, and plain in which a sandwich might travel.