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Cheese Sandwiches (There are several ways)
There are several ways of preparing cheese sandwiches. The simple sandwich has the bread cut round and buttered and between the two very thin slices is placed a dainty slice of Swiss cheese.
Barely a recipe by modern standards, but it is a set of instructions and the proportions matter more than they look. This is a tea sandwich, not lunch.
- Cut round means a cutterThe rounds were stamped out with a biscuit or cookie cutter. A dense white sandwich loaf, sliced thin (or a thick slice split horizontally), suits the "very thin slices" the recipe calls for better than standard supermarket slices.
- Butter both facesButter -- The recipe says only that the rounds are buttered. Butter softened to spreading consistency and taken to the edge helps seal the crumb so the sandwich does not dry out on the plate; cold butter tears thin bread.
- Swiss cheese in 1900Swiss cheese -- Most likely Emmental or a domestic imitation of it, mild and firm. Slice it thinner than the bread and trim it flush with the round so no cheese overhangs.
- YieldA standard sandwich loaf yields about two rounds per slice, so a dozen sandwiches takes roughly twelve slices of bread plus scraps.
- Holding themAssembled rounds dry out fast at the cut edges. Cover with a barely damp cloth or wax paper and refrigerate no more than a couple of hours before serving.
Late nineteenth-century tea sandwiches ran heavily to watercress, cucumber, chicken and potted meats. Swiss-style cheese was being produced domestically in Ohio and Wisconsin by the closing decades of the century, so a "dainty slice of Swiss" need not have been a luxury purchase. The round cut, and the trimming away of crusts and corners that it entails, points to the tea table rather than the lunch pail. The offhand opening line, promising several ways and then describing only one, is a common habit of sandwich chapters in cookery compilations of this kind, which often read as lists of suggestions for a cook assumed to know her business.