Chicken

Turkey, cucumber and watercress sprouts afternoon tea sandwiches

November 23, 2009
5
1 Ratings
  • Serves 6
Author Notes

Simple, yet so delicious. Sometimes we over elaborate a sandwich with bacon, apples, mayonnaise or honey mustard sauces. But these sandwiches are pure simplicity and ever so elegant. This is my childhood memory, from the trips we made with my parents to London. We always had late afternoon tea at the Mayfair Hotel, at the time a very elegant and full of tradition hotel. They made these incredible soft sandwiches of paper thin sliced breast of turkey with watercress sprouts on white sandwhich bread. I wish I had a photograph of that time with the tea room so elegantly decorated - it's like an image in my mind that I will never forget. And when I made them today, all the memories came back! —Maria Teresa Jorge

What You'll Need
Ingredients
  • 12 slices of good white sandwich bread or brioche
  • 2 tablespoons salted butter at room temperature (if not available use normal butter and add a spinkle of salt)
  • 1 bunch watercress sprouts or lamb's lettuce
  • 6 very thin slices of turkey breats
  • 1/2 cucumber
  • 1 handful green young salad leaves for decoration
  • 6 baby tomatoes
Directions
  1. Wash and dry the watercress sprouts. These sprouts are very mild in flavour and have nothing to do with the taste of grown watercress that can be quite piquant. If you can't find the sprouts, I suppose the nearest taste would be lamb's lettuce. Keep in a clean kitchen tea towel.
  2. Wash the tender and smaller leaves of a lettuce. Pat dry in a kitchen tea towel and set aside.
  3. Wash and peel the cucumber so you have thin stripes of dark green peel left. Cut the cucumber in paper thin slices and put on a clean kitchen tea towel to absorb the water.
  4. Trim the crust off the white sandwich bread, butter each slice. You really have to use salted butter to give the special flavour. If you don't have it just use normal butter and sprinkle a tiny bit of salt on the butter.
  5. On top of the butter side add 4 or 5 slices of cucumber, one very thin breat of turkey slice some watercress sprouts and cover with the other slice, butter side down. Press to adhere and cut in 2 triangles.
  6. Serve 2 triangles on each plate with some fresh green lettuce and a baby tomato cut in half. Serve for afternoon tea. Also they are especially nice for tea parties and children's birthday parties. For children cut the traingles once more so you have really small snadwiches.

See what other Food52ers are saying.

  • Kelsey Banfield
    Kelsey Banfield
  • Maria Teresa Jorge
    Maria Teresa Jorge

2 Reviews

Kelsey B. November 24, 2009
What a fun twist on tea sandwiches!
 
Maria T. November 25, 2009
Actually, this is a totally old fashioned British standard tea sandwich. It's only in recent years that they started making bla, bla, bla sandwiches. My husband'ss aunt who is English and 96 years old, always makes turkey and cucumber sandwiches when we go there. So I suppose to English people this would be rather boring and monotonous but I absolutely love them, especially with the salted butter and a rich white sandwich bread, no crusts, I could eat them every day!