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Tomato and Onion Sandwich
Mix in a bowl some tomato catsup, season with pepper and salt and a pinch of sugar, add a little finely chopped onion, mix and place between thin slices of buttered white bread, with a crisp lettuce leaf between.
A no-cook spread with no quantities given at all, so the proportions are yours to set. The one thing that matters is keeping the ketchup from soaking the bread.
- Butter is the waterproofingSpread butter right to the edges of both slices before anything wet touches them. In a sandwich built on ketchup, that thin fat layer is the only thing standing between you and sodden bread, and the recipe assumes you understand this.
- ProportionsNothing is measured. A workable ratio is about 3 tablespoons ketchup to 1 tablespoon very finely minced onion, seasoned with a pinch each of salt, pepper and sugar. That fills two sandwiches.
- The catsup of 1909Catsups of the period varied a good deal; many were thinner, sharper with vinegar and more heavily spiced with clove and allspice than today's ketchup, though the big commercial brands were already sweet and thick by 1909. Modern ketchup carries plenty of sugar, so the "pinch of sugar" may be unnecessary; taste before adding it.
- OnionChop it as finely as the recipe says, or finer. Raw onion in coarse pieces will overwhelm a spread this mild and will slide out of the sandwich when bitten.
- Let the spread standTen minutes in the bowl lets the salt draw juice from the onion and the sugar dissolve. It also lets you see how loose the mixture is before it goes near bread.
- Assemble to orderThis one does not travel or hold. Build it, cut it and eat it; an hour in a lunch tin turns the lettuce limp and the bread pink.
- Bread"Thin slices of buttered white bread" points to a fine-crumbed sandwich loaf cut thin, on the order of a quarter inch. A coarse open crumb lets the ketchup through.
Eva Greene Fuller's Up-to-Date Sandwich Book (1909) collects several hundred fillings from a moment when the sandwich had just become respectable American party food, driven by the bridge table, the picnic hamper and the afternoon tea tray. Recipes like this one show how much the genre depended on bottled goods: commercial tomato catsup was one of the earliest mass-produced condiments in the United States, and by 1909 it was cheap and reliably shelf-stable enough that a cook could treat it as a base rather than a finishing sauce. The title's promise of being "up to date" rested largely on that pantry — catsup, prepared mustard, potted meats, cream cheese — and on the era's fondness for the thin, crustless, buttered white slice that would define the tea sandwich for the next half century.