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Watercress and Egg Sandwich No. 2
Cut watercress into small pieces, removing the stalks, and mix with finely chopped hard-boiled eggs, seasoned with salt and pepper. Place between thin, buttered slices of bread, sprinkling the. cress and egg very lightly with lemon juice. Press together, and cut in squares, removing the crusts.
A tea-table sandwich that depends almost entirely on how dry the cress is and how fresh the eggs are cut. The recipe gives no quantities, so treat the proportions below as a working starting point.
- Working proportionsFour hard-boiled eggs to a generous cup of picked watercress leaves fills about six rounds of sandwiches, or roughly 24 small squares. Chop the eggs fine but not to paste; the texture is the point.
- Dry the cressWash, then spin or towel the leaves completely dry before chopping. Wet cress weeps into the crumb within minutes and turns the bread grey and limp.
- The lemon is a seasoning, not a dressingA few drops only. Enough acid to lift the sulphur of the egg, not enough to soak the bread. The recipe sprinkles it over the cress and egg as the sandwich is built.
- Butter both facesThe instruction to butter the bread is structural as much as it is for flavour. A thin, even film of soft butter right to the edges seals the crumb against moisture from the egg and cress.
- Hard-boiled eggsTwelve minutes at a bare simmer, then straight into cold water. Overcooking is what produces the green-grey ring and the chalky yolk this filling does not want.
- The breadA close-grained white sandwich loaf, sliced thin, chills well and cuts cleanly. A day-old loaf is easier to slice thinly than a fresh one.
- Cutting and holdingPress the finished sandwiches under a board or plate for a few minutes, trim the crusts with a long sharp knife, then cut into squares. Cover with a barely damp cloth and refrigerate no more than an hour or two.
- Watercress substitutesIf cress is unavailable, young rocket or the inner leaves of upland cress give a comparable pepperiness. Avoid mature rocket, which is bitter enough to swamp the egg.
Watercress sandwiches belong to the Edwardian afternoon-tea table, where the aim was something small, cool and easily eaten standing up. Cress was cheap and widely available in Britain and the eastern United States, grown in flowing beds and sold in bunches by street hawkers, and its sharpness was valued as a foil to bland fillings such as butter, cream cheese or egg. That this book gives a second, numbered version of the same pairing says something about how sandwich cookery was treated: as a system of combinations rather than a set of fixed dishes, with compilers listing every workable variation they could gather. The trimmed crusts and small squares are not fussiness but function, since a sandwich handed round with tea had to be eaten in a bite or two without a plate.