Spinach Sandwich
Chop cold boiled spinach and the yolks of hardboiled eggs fine, add a dash of salt and vinegar. Spread between thin slices of buttered white bread.
Garnish with a pickle.
A frugal filling built on two things a 1909 kitchen always had left over: cooked spinach and hard-boiled eggs. The proportions are left entirely to the cook, which is the main thing to settle before you start.
- ProportionsThe recipe leaves them entirely to the cook. As a starting point, the yolks of two large eggs to about a half cup of cooked, squeezed and chopped spinach makes a spreadable paste; more yolk makes it richer and drier, more spinach makes it wetter and greener.
- Squeeze the spinachThis is the hinge. Cold boiled spinach holds a surprising amount of water, and unsqueezed it will soak the bread within minutes. Wring it hard in a clean towel before chopping.
- Chop, or sieve"Fine" means fine — the filling should read as a paste, not as leaves. Push the yolks through a sieve rather than chopping them, and they will bind the spinach instead of sitting in crumbs.
- The vinegarA dash means a teaspoon or less. Cider or white wine vinegar suits it; the acid is doing the work that lemon would do now, cutting the flat mineral taste of boiled spinach.
- Frozen spinachA 10 oz package of frozen leaf spinach, thawed and wrung out, stands in for a bunch of fresh boiled and is closer in texture to what the original intends than fresh raw spinach wilted quickly.
- The leftover whitesThe recipe uses yolks only. Chop the whites into another sandwich filling or a salad rather than discarding them.
- Bread and butterThin white bread, buttered to the edges, is not decoration; the butter is a moisture barrier between a damp filling and a soft crumb. Assemble close to serving, and trim the crusts if you want a tea-table effect, though the recipe does not call for it.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. At the proportions suggested above, about four small sandwiches, cut in halves or quarters for a tray.
Sandwich books were a small publishing genre in the first decade of the twentieth century, when afternoon tea, card parties and packed luncheons all wanted something more genteel than a slab of meat between bread. Eva Greene Fuller's collection, first issued in 1909, organizes its fillings by principal ingredient. The recipe belongs to a tradition of using up cold cooked vegetables that would otherwise be wasted, and the pickle garnish is a period reflex: savory sandwiches in books of this era are often shown with a pickle, an olive or a radish beside them to supply the sharpness and crunch the soft filling lacks.