Tongue Sandwich
Between thin slices of lightly buttered white bread, lay a crisp lettuce leaf that has been dipped in mayonnaise dressing; on that lay a thin slice of tongue; on top of that a slice of ripe tomato spread with mayonnaise.
A straightforward layered sandwich whose only real difficulty is sourcing the tongue and keeping the assembly from going soggy.
- TongueThe recipe calls only for a thin slice; a book of this kind would most likely have a cooked, chilled tongue already on hand to slice from. Deli counters and Latin or Jewish butchers sell cooked tongue ready-sliced; ask for it shaved rather than cut in slabs, since thickness is what makes tongue chewy in a sandwich.
- SlicingCold tongue slices cleanly only when thoroughly chilled and cut across the grain with a long thin blade. Warm tongue tears.
- Mayonnaise"Mayonnaise dressing" in older American books usually points to a hand-beaten mayonnaise rather than the jarred kind, though the phrase was also used loosely for cooked salad dressings. Commercial mayonnaise loosened with a little lemon juice is a reasonable stand-in, and dipping a lettuce leaf works better with the thinner version.
- The tomato is the hingeA sliced ripe tomato will flood the bread within minutes. Salt the slices, drain them on a rack or paper for ten minutes, blot, and assemble immediately before serving.
- BreadThin slices of a fine-crumbed white pan loaf, buttered edge to edge. Butter, not more mayonnaise, is what keeps the bottom slice intact.
- Yield and servingAs written this makes one sandwich. Trim the crusts and cut in two triangles or four fingers if you like.
Sandwich books proliferated in America between about 1900 and 1920, when the sandwich moved from tavern food to the centerpiece of the ladies' luncheon, the card party and the box lunch, and publishers responded with slim volumes offering a hundred or more variations arranged by filling. Tongue was a cheap, useful cut, and households are often said to have poached and pressed it under a weight so that it could be kept and sliced cold for days after the hot meal it started as. The addition of tomato and mayonnaise here suggests a more elaborate school of sandwich-making than the plainest treatments of cold meat.