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Tip-Top Sandwich
Chop fine six slices of uncooked bacon, add two green peppers (seeds removed) chopped fine, three onions the size of an egg chopped fine, season with pepper and salt. Fry the above mixture until the bacon is done, then scramble in two eggs. Place between thin slices of lightly buttered white bread. Garnish with a radish.
A hot bacon-and-egg filling closer to a Denver omelet than to the cold, ladylike fillings that fill most of this book. A few of the quantities need translating.
- Onions "the size of an egg"That is roughly 2 oz each, so three of them come to about a cup of chopped onion, or a little more — a large amount against six slices of bacon. Reducing to one medium onion keeps the bacon and egg in the picture.
- Green peppersIn a book of this period this means green bell peppers, not chilies. Two of them chopped fine come to something nearer two cups; expect a vegetable-forward filling rather than a bacon one.
- Uncooked bacon"Uncooked" here simply specifies raw rashers rather than already-cooked bacon. Chopping it fine before frying is what renders enough fat to cook the vegetables — no additional fat is needed.
- Order of cookingThe hinge is getting the onion and pepper genuinely soft before the eggs go in. Bacon cut small crisps in five or six minutes, well before a cup of onion has given up its water, so let the pan go longer than the bacon alone requires.
- Scrambling in the eggsTwo eggs into that volume of filling act as a binder, not a layer of scrambled egg. Pull the pan off the heat while they are still visibly moist; they will finish setting in the residual heat and in the sandwich.
- YieldEnough for four sandwiches on thin-sliced white bread, or two generous ones. Best assembled and eaten warm — the filling weeps once it cools, so butter both slices right to the edges.
- The radishPurely a plate garnish of the period, alongside olives and celery curls. Nothing is lost by skipping it.
Sandwich collections proliferated in the United States in the first decade of the twentieth century, when the sandwich was moving from a picnic item to the centerpiece of ladies' luncheons, card parties and the new commercial lunch counter. Books of this kind tend to run heavily to cold spreads — potted meats, cheese pastes, chopped nuts bound with mayonnaise — so a hot skillet filling like this one stands out, and its bacon, green pepper, onion and egg are exactly the combination that American diners later sold as a Denver or Western sandwich, a lineage usually traced to the Denver omelet rather than documented. The name "Tip-Top" is of a piece with the period's habit of naming recipes by praise rather than contents; a great many turn-of-the-century dishes arrived as Perfection, Excelsior or Superior something.