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Lettuce Sandwiches
Spread the bread with thick mayonnaise dressing and lay a leaf of crisp, well dried lettuce between the slices of bread. Some think it an improvement to add a very thin layer of finely chopped nuts.
A three-line recipe that lives or dies on moisture control. The instruction that matters is "well dried" — a wet leaf turns the bread to paste within minutes.
- Dry the lettuce properlyWash and spin or blot the leaves until no water clings to them, then chill so they stay rigid. A salad spinner does in ten seconds what the period cook did with a wire basket and a tea towel.
- "Thick mayonnaise dressing"A hand-beaten egg-and-oil emulsion, stiff enough to hold its shape on a knife. Commercial jarred mayonnaise is generally stiff enough and works as intended; if you make your own, use pasteurized eggs, since nothing here is cooked.
- The mayonnaise is the waterproofingThe mayonnaise as a barrier -- spread it edge to edge rather than in a single central dollop. A fat layer helps keep lettuce juice out of the crumb, which may be why the recipe specifies it thick.
- BreadAssume a fine-grained white sandwich loaf, sliced thin — the standard of the period's tea table. Trimming the crusts and cutting into fingers or triangles is consistent with how these were served.
- LettuceRead "crisp" as a firm-hearted head rather than the loose leaf and baby-leaf mixes sold now, which wilt too fast. Use the pale inner leaves and flatten the thick rib with the side of a knife so the sandwich closes evenly.
- The nutsChop them very fine, near to a coarse meal, and press them into the mayonnaise so they do not roll out at the first bite. Walnuts or almonds suit best; toast them if you want more flavour than texture.
- Timing and yieldBest made no more than an hour ahead and kept covered with a damp cloth in the refrigerator. As a rough guide, one head of lettuce and a cup of mayonnaise will dress about a dozen thin-cut sandwiches.
Lettuce sandwiches suit the turn-of-the-century tea and luncheon table: light, cool, cut small, and made to be eaten soon after assembly. Their popularity broadly parallels the spread of mayonnaise in American home cooking, at a period when it was still a dressing beaten by hand, drop by drop, and one that cookbooks of the era commonly treated at length. The nut variation is in keeping with much sandwich-making of the period, where fillings were often built by adding chopped nuts, chopped olives or minced pimento to a mayonnaise base.