Recipe: small English cucumber sandwiches for high tea

Anybody who has gone to an afternoon tea or also called high tea, (it certainly is a British tradition) has consumed those cute little cucumber sandwiches.
These sandwiches are served together with a variety of sweets like scones, crumpets, etc.

They are easy to make, but it is not enough to just put a slice of cucumber on white bread.

You need:
1 loaf of white bread, 1 day old
2 cucumbers
1 cup of soft butter
salt, pepper, a little bit of vinegar
a paper towel roll, a large work area and a sifter over a bowl

First you peel the cucumbers and cut them in very thin slices. Put them in the sifter which is sitting over a bowl.
Sprinkle some vinegar over the cucumber slices, 1 tablespoon, and salt them. Leave them like this for 30 minutes.
In the meantime cut off the crust of the white bread, which means at all sides so that the loaf is without a crust.
Now cut the bread in thin slices, it should not be thicker than ½ inch, if you can manage that.
Put the slices of bread beside each other and spread butter on them.
Now back to the cucumbers:
In the meantime some of the water should have dripped down. Wash your hands, put those cucumber slices on a tea towel and dry them off while pressing down. The pressed down slices are put on a dry tea towel again.
Place the cucumber slices on the buttered bread slices so that they overlap, then cut the bread diagonally so that you have 2 triangles.
Continue doing this until the bread and cucumber are all used up.
Stack the triangles on a serving plate and cover with aluminum foil so that they don’t try out.
Make sure you have some nice Earl Grey Tea and there you go, you got your English Afternoon Tea.

Uli