Summer Sandwich
Cut white bread into rounds with a cake cutter and lightly butter. Chop one-half pound of cold boiled mutton fine; add two tablespoonfuls of melted butter, and a dash of salt and pepper. Peel four tomatoes, cut these into rather thick slices and remove the seeds from the centre. Place a lettuce leaf that has been lightly dipped in mayonnaise dressing on a slice of toast, and put a slice of tomato on top of that. Fill the space from which you have taken the seeds with the mutton mixture. Put on top another slice of toasted and lightly buttered bread, and press the two slices firmly together.
A cold-joint sandwich built around a tomato slice used as a cup for the meat. The construction is fussier than the ingredient list suggests, and the text quietly contradicts itself about the bread.
- Toast or notThe opening line says to cut and butter rounds of white bread; the assembly then calls for toast, top and bottom. Toasting is the better reading, since untoasted bread collapses under a wet tomato slice, but toast the rounds after cutting so they hold their shape.
- Cake cutter sizeA round cutter of about 2½ to 3 inches gives a bread round close to the diameter of a good tomato slice. Cut the bread first, then trim the tomato slices to match rather than the other way round.
- Cold boiled muttonMutton is sheep over about two years old and is rarely sold in the United States now. Cold roast or braised lamb shoulder or leg is the direct stand-in; the recipe assumes leftovers from a boiled joint, so any well-cooked, well-seasoned lamb works.
- Chop, do not grindHand-chopped meat holds together in flecks; a food processor turns half a pound of cooked lamb into paste in seconds. Chop fine with a knife and stir in the melted butter while the meat is at room temperature so it coats rather than sets in lumps.
- The butter is the binderTwo tablespoons of melted butter through half a pound of chopped meat is what makes the filling hold in the tomato cavity. It firms as it cools, so assemble while the mixture is still pliable and serve within the hour, before the butter goes hard and the tomato weeps.
- Preparing the tomatoesPeel by scoring the skins and dipping in boiling water for fifteen seconds, then into cold. Cut slices about half an inch thick, scoop out the seed pockets, and salt the slices lightly and drain them cut-side down for ten minutes or the bread will be soaked through.
- MayonnaisePeriod mayonnaise was made fresh with raw yolks. Commercial mayonnaise, made with pasteurised egg, is the sensible choice for a sandwich that sits on a luncheon plate. Dip the lettuce leaf rather than spreading, as the original says, so the dressing stays thin.
- YieldFour tomatoes and half a pound of meat make roughly six to eight sandwiches, depending on cutter size. Seasoning is left to a dash of salt and pepper, which is thin for cold lamb; a little mustard or lemon in the meat mixture is in keeping with the period.
Small sandwich manuals proliferated in America between about 1900 and 1920, when the sandwich moved from a picnic makeshift to a fixture of the ladies' luncheon, the card party and the afternoon tea table. Their organising logic is visible here: bread cut into rounds with a cake cutter, fillings built in layers, and a heavy reliance on the cold joint left from a previous day's dinner. Mutton remained a staple in English households of the period and was still familiar, if less universal, in American ones, boiled with caper sauce or root vegetables and expected to reappear cold; a book of this kind exists in part to tell a cook what to do with it on the second day. The tomato hollowed out to hold the filling belongs to the same turn-of-the-century garnish thinking that produced stuffed tomato salads and aspic moulds, and it marks the sandwich as a summer dish in an era when fresh tomatoes were seasonal.