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Egg Sandwich
Remove the yolks of half dozen hard boiled eggs and rub smooth. Add a teaspoonful of mustard, a half teaspoonful of salt, a dash of pepper and enough vinegar to make the mixture stiff. Add, if desired, the whites finely chopped, and spread between thin slices of bread.
A straightforward egg salad filling with no butter and no mayonnaise — the binding comes from the yolks themselves, sharpened with mustard and vinegar. A few points on quantities and texture.
- Mustard means powderMustard may mean powder -- In books of this period "a teaspoonful of mustard" in a cold, sharp mixture often means dry mustard powder rather than a prepared paste, though some writers meant made mustard and said so. A teaspoon of powder for six yolks is assertive; start with half and taste. If you use prepared mustard instead, you will need rather more and will add liquid, so hold back the vinegar.
- Vinegar, added by eye"Enough to make the mixture stiff" is the hinge, and it reads backwards to modern ears: vinegar is a liquid, but rubbed into dry crumbled yolks it brings them to a paste rather than thinning them. Add it a few drops at a time. Six yolks will take roughly two to three teaspoons before the mixture goes slack.
- Rub smoothPress the yolks through a fine sieve rather than mashing with a fork. Fork-mashed yolk stays grainy and binds less readily.
- The whitesChopping them fine matters more than it sounds — coarse white makes the filling slippery and the sandwich falls apart when cut. Chop to something near the size of rice grains, or leave them out and use them elsewhere.
- Boiling the eggsCover the eggs with water, bring to a boil, cover and hold off the heat about ten minutes, then chill at once in cold water. Long hard boiling gives the green-grey ring at the yolk edge and a sulphurous note that the mustard will not hide.
- Bread"Thin slices" suggests a fine-crumbed white loaf cut thin, and if you are making tea sandwiches the crusts are usually trimmed; a day-old loaf cuts more cleanly. Butter the bread lightly first if the sandwiches are to sit for any length of time; the filling has no fat to seal the crumb and will soak in.
- YieldSix yolks fill about six to eight rounds of sandwich, or twenty-four to thirty-two small tea triangles. Keep the filling refrigerated and use it within a day.
Egg sandwiches of this kind belong to the late-nineteenth-century vogue for the tea sandwich — thin bread, crusts removed, a soft savoury filling, eaten with the fingers at afternoon receptions and packed for picnics and railway journeys. This version uses no mayonnaise: bottled mayonnaise was not widely sold in America until the early twentieth century, and a mustard-and-vinegar dressing could be worked straight into the yolks without making a dressing first. Sandwich chapters grew in American household books of this period as lunch moved increasingly into the lunch pail and the picnic basket, and compilers filled them with variations on the same technique: something rich pounded to a paste, something sharp to cut it, spread thin.