Cucumber Sandwich

Rooting around in the fridge for something easy for dinner while My Beloved was on a business trip, I found a nice, fat cucumber and a loaf of sourdough bread. Promising ingredients, but cucumber sandwiches demand really, really thin bread to showcase the cuke, not the bread.

So, I whipped out my all-time favorite kitchen gadget, the Slice-a-Slice my mother bought in the '50s, which separates a normal piece of bread into two.

I love this thing! You insert bread into it, squeeze it gently together, and slowly saw the bread in half with a good, thin bread knife. A little mayo, a little cucumber and nice firm white bread - even if you leave the crusts on, it's a refined and subtle treat.

Among my earliest memories is Mom making piles of skinny cucumber sandwiches to take to our Sunday picnics at Makaha Beach on Oahu, back before Statehood when we were the only family on the beach. She had a big wicker basket into which she would pack - ever so neatly, arranging and re-arranging until it all fit perfectly - our sandwiches and thermoses of water and iced tea. Dad would fill the trunk of our two-tone gray Oldsmobile sedan with umbrella, towels, wicker beach chairs, straw beach mats and diaper bag.

We'd stop at a pineapple stand on the way to the beach to buy paper plates of unbelievably sweet sliced pineapple for dessert, still warm from the field and wrapped in waxed paper to keep the juices in. These stands were nothing but a covered booth into which the fruit was tossed through the open back, peeled, cored and sliced in a jiffy with an enormous and lethally sharp machete, and offered with a wide smile and an assurance that it was "Mo' bettah" than anything else on earth.

On the way home after a day at the beach, hot, sandy (we never did get all the sand out of that car), salty and tired, we'd always stop at Tastee Freez for a soft ice cream cone, a special treat to keep us kids from squabbling in the back seat. We each got a cone whose size corresponded with our own; my Dad got the Bus Driver Special (three scoops), Mom and big brother enjoyed the Truck Driver Special (two scoops) and us little kids each licked a Car Driver Special.

I don't know if the Slice-a-Slice is made any longer but I'll bet you could find one on eBay. Very cool - almost as cool as the cucumber sandwiches and the sweet Hawaiian memories.