Tomato Sandwich
Pare, chill, and cut ripe tomatoes thin, season with salt and pepper and a little lemon juice. Place between thin slices of lightly buttered white bread with a crisp lettuce leaf between.
A tea-table sandwich that lives or dies on moisture control. Everything in the original wording — paring, chilling, thin slices, buttered bread — is aimed at keeping the bread from turning to paste.
- Salt the tomatoes separatelyThe single instruction that matters: season the slices, lay them on a rack or paper towel for 10 to 15 minutes, then blot before assembling. Salting on the bread draws juice straight into the crumb.
- ParingA serrated peeler works on a firm tomato; for softer fruit, dip 10 seconds in boiling water and slip the skin off, then chill again thoroughly. The chilling is functional, not decorative — cold tomatoes shed less juice and cut cleanly.
- Butter is the barrierUse softened butter and spread it right to the edges rather than leaving a scrape in the middle. The film of fat is what keeps the bread dry, so cover the whole face of each slice; the original's 'lightly' refers to how much butter, not how far it goes.
- BreadThe book calls only for thin slices of white bread; a close-grained sandwich loaf suits the purpose best. Very open or rustic bread has nothing to hold back the juice.
- Lemon juiceA few drops only. It brightens tomatoes that are out of peak season; on a good August tomato it can be skipped entirely.
- Assemble to orderThese do not hold. Make them within a few minutes of serving, and if you are trimming crusts and cutting into fingers for a tea tray, do it immediately before they go out.
- YieldThe original gives no quantities; as a rough guide, one medium tomato dresses about three sandwiches, or a dozen small tea fingers with the crusts removed.
Eva Greene Fuller's The Up-to-Date Sandwich Book appeared in 1909, at the height of the American fashion for the light luncheon and the afternoon tea sandwich, and its several hundred entries are mostly variations on a fixed formula: thin white bread, butter, one filling, sometimes a lettuce leaf. That a plain tomato sandwich merited an entry at all reflects how recently the tomato had become everyday eating in American kitchens — nineteenth-century American cookbooks commonly called for tomatoes to be stewed at length, and it was chiefly in the later part of the century and after that the sliced raw tomato became a commonplace of salads and sandwiches.