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Salad Sandwiches
Salad sandwiches are made with lettuce, cucumbers and capers, all finely chopped and mixed with mayonnaise dressing; place on lettuce leaves between unbuttered slices of brown bread.
A three-line formula rather than a recipe, and everything depends on managing water. Chopped cucumber and lettuce dressed with mayonnaise will flood unbuttered bread within minutes.
- Drain the cucumber firstPeel, seed and chop the cucumber, salt it lightly and let it sit in a sieve for 15-20 minutes, then press out the liquid in a towel. Skip this and the filling turns to soup and the bread to paste.
- "Brown bread"In an American sandwich chapter of this period this most likely means a sliced graham or whole-wheat loaf rather than steamed Boston brown bread, though the recipe does not say. Any firm whole-wheat sandwich bread works; cut it thin.
- Unbuttered is deliberate, and a problemThe recipe specifies unbuttered bread; it does not say why. Butter is what waterproofs a slice, so if you are not eating these immediately, a thin scrape of butter on the crumb side is the practical fix.
- CapersBrined capers should be rinsed and blotted, and they are salty enough that the filling needs no extra salt. Nonpareils can go in whole; larger capers are better chopped, as the recipe directs.
- ProportionsNone are given. A workable ratio is one cup shredded lettuce, one small drained cucumber, a tablespoon of chopped capers and two to three tablespoons of mayonnaise -- just enough to bind, not to coat.
- MayonnaiseA cookbook of this period assumes mayonnaise made at home from raw yolks and oil. If you make your own for an uncooked filling, use pasteurized eggs and keep the sandwiches cold; commercial mayonnaise is made with pasteurized egg and is the simpler choice.
- Yield and timingThe quantities above fill six to eight thin sandwiches. Assemble no more than half an hour before serving and keep them covered with a damp cloth in the refrigerator.
Salad sandwiches belong to the late-nineteenth-century vogue for the cold luncheon, the afternoon tea table and the picnic hamper, when mayonnaise-bound fillings between thin bread were a common light course. The pairing of mayonnaise with brown or graham bread reflects the era's enthusiasm for whole meal, promoted in American households from the 1830s onward through the writing of Sylvester Graham and his successors. Capers, imported pickled in brine, were a sharp condiment a genteel cook could use freely: they add acidity and salt. The instruction to serve on lettuce leaves between unbuttered slices is characteristic of the tea sandwich as it was then understood -- small, pale, structurally fragile, and meant to be eaten at once.