Cream Cheese and Smoked Salmon

At a hotel afternoon tea, the bottom tier of the three-tier stand carries a row of four sandwich fingers cut to identical length, and the cream cheese and smoked salmon finger is one of the standing four. The other three are usually cucumber, egg mayonnaise, and either coronation chicken or roast beef and horseradish. The proportions are decided by the format. A crustless white finger about three inches long carries a single pink fold of Lochmuir or Loch Fyne smoked salmon and a thin even white layer of full-fat Philadelphia underneath, the two laid into a closed sandwich and cut with the crust trimmed in a single press from a sharp knife.

The Scottish source of the salmon is what carries this version. Loch Fyne, the long Argyll sea loch where Johnny Noble and Andy Lane started the oyster operation at its head in 1978 and added a salmon smokery in the early 1980s, supplies one of the named labels on a hotel sandwich-tier. The Marks and Spencer Lochmuir brand, a marketing name created in 2006 for Scottish farmed salmon, carries the supermarket-tier version. A traditional cold smoke takes a salt-cured side at ambient temperature over oak shavings for around a day, often shavings from retired whisky casks, and the result is a deep amber flesh, faintly oaky and salt-cured rather than cooked, sliced thin enough that a single fold layers onto a finger sandwich. The dairy side is American: Philadelphia, the cream cheese made first by William Lawrence in Chester, New York in 1872 and acquired by Kraft in 1928, is the British default jar.

What the cream cheese does on this sandwich is the work butter does on a plain salmon-and-brown-bread tea sandwich, but with a different mechanism. It spreads firm and binds the salmon flat to the slice, sealing the crumb against the oil the fish weeps as it sits, and the soft tang of a full-fat cream cheese rounds off the sharper smoke and salt of the cure into a single mouthful rather than two stacked layers. Spread thin, the cheese stops doing its sealing job and the bread goes pink and limp by service; spread heavy, the cheese reads as the lead note and the fish disappears under it. The slice has to be set down flat with even cheese at the edges, because the closed sandwich is going to be cut twice on the diagonal and the cheese is what holds the four resulting points together.

The salmon fails on slice thickness and the bread fails on crust. A slab of salmon read as a single thick wedge sits unevenly and the bite tears one half-side away from the other; sliced to translucence and folded into the cheese, the same weight of fish layers and gives evenly. A bread carrier with too much crust character, a heavy sourdough or a granary loaf, drowns the fish and the cheese both, since both are quiet enough that a loud wheat note overwhelms them. Capers, when they are used, are tiny and few, set against the richness rather than scattered for show; too many turn the bite into a vinegar pulse the fish cannot get past. Dill is the alternative accent and lands fresher, less acid. Two soft rich layers without any acid at all read as cloying by the second finger.

The sandwich on the three-tier stand at a hotel like Brown's, the Ritz, or the Wolseley arrives cool from a covered tray and the smell off the bottom tier is faint cold-smoke ash with a soft dairy note underneath. The bread gives without resistance under the teeth and disappears in the way only a crustless white finger does. The cream cheese arrives a beat later as a cool, mildly tangy coating that the lip catches on. The salmon comes through in layered folds, each one giving softly and salt-and-smoke rather than fishy. A caper, if present, breaks against the molar in a small sharp acid burst. The bite is quiet and quick and the finger is gone in two; the eater reaches at once for the next thing on the tray, because no afternoon-tea sandwich on the bottom tier asks the eater to stop.

The British afternoon-tea sandwich has its own register on the menu. A Brown's Hotel or a Cliveden tea is booked and dressed for and arrives plated by an attendant who names the four fingers as they go down. A high-street Patisserie Valerie or an M&S Cafe boxes the same four for a daytime tea at a much lower price point. A supermarket meal-deal triangle of cream cheese and smoked salmon on malted brown is the same logical filling, deconstructed and bound into a wedge format for a lunch-counter audience rather than for a tea stand. Asking for a smoked salmon and cream cheese sandwich in a London hotel and asking for the same wedge from a Tesco chiller are the same filling read in two different rooms.

The variations are the rest of the cream-cheese tea shelf, each defined by what is set against the same dairy spread. The cream cheese and cucumber substitutes a cool water-crisp slice for the salt-smoke layer and pulls the sandwich into the cucumber-cousin tea-tray tradition that goes back to the Duchess of Bedford in the 1840s. Cream cheese and chive works a green onion herb through the spread. Cream cheese with celery or walnut adds a dry savoury crunch. The plain smoked salmon sandwich drops the cheese for brown bread and butter and runs on lemon. The American bagel and lox, with the same fish on a boiled-and-baked Polish-Jewish bread, is the closest cousin in another room: New York City turned the same ingredients into the appetizing-store breakfast counter from the 1930s onwards, while London turned them into a tea-tray finger.

Origin and history

The afternoon-tea ritual the sandwich belongs to has a single often-told invention story. Anna Maria Russell, the seventh Duchess of Bedford, is credited with starting the practice in the 1840s as a private bridge between an early-afternoon lunch and a much later dinner; the duchess began serving tea with light bread and butter to friends in her rooms at Belvoir Castle and Woburn Abbey, and the social form she popularised spread through the aristocracy and then through middle-class hotels in the second half of the 19th century. The finger sandwich, sliced thin and crustless, was already the standard form by the 1880s, when the Savoy and Brown's were running daily teas in their hotel lounges.

The Scottish cold-smoked salmon that goes into the modern version is a more recent local product. Loch Fyne Oysters Ltd was founded by Johnny Noble and Andy Lane at the head of the sea loch in 1978; the firm built a smokery alongside the oyster beds and began curing salmon to the local recipe through the late 1970s and 1980s, supplying the high-end British grocery trade and the hotel kitchens. The Marks and Spencer Lochmuir brand, launched in 2006, fixed a supermarket-tier name to Scottish-farmed salmon and broadened the same fish across the high street.

The cheese is older and American. The New York dairyman William Lawrence first made what became Philadelphia cream cheese in his Chester, New York creamery in 1872, while attempting an imitation of French Neufchatel and producing a richer, more spreadable cheese instead. The product was given the Philadelphia name in 1880 by the New York distributor A.L. Reynolds, the city carrying a reputation at the time for fine dairy. The brand passed to Kraft in 1928 and has been the default supermarket cream cheese in British grocery aisles since the 1960s. The British tea-tray reading of the cream-cheese-and-salmon idea, with its Scottish fish and its Kraft American cheese on a Bedfordshire-Victorian sandwich form, is the meeting of three separately-dated traditions on a single crustless white finger.