Home › The Principles of Cookery › Pastry Sandwiches
Pastry Sandwiches
Roll out some good puff-paste till it is as thin as a wafer, and cut it into two pieces the same size and shape. Lay one of these on a buttered baking-tin, and spread over it lightly some fine fruit jelly. Place the other piece of pastry on the top, press it lightly with the fingers, mark it in squares where it is afterwards to be cut, and bake in a moderate oven. Sift powdered sugar over the sandwiches before serving them, and arrange them on a neatly-folded napkin, or cut them when cold into narrow strips, pile them in a circle on a dish, and pour whipped cream into the middle of them. Time to bake, twenty minutes. Probable cost, without the cream, 8d. Sufficient, a quarter of a pound of paste will make a nice supper dish.
A simple jam-filled puff pastry slice from a Victorian supper table. The only real difficulties are the thinness of the pastry and the behaviour of hot jelly between two rising sheets.
- Oven temperature"Moderate oven" is conventionally read as around 350F/180C, though the book gives no temperatures. Puff paste rolled wafer-thin wants more heat than that to lift properly: 400-425F/200-220C for 15-20 minutes gives better layers and a drier base.
- The hinge: use a thick jelly, thinlyA loose jam will boil, run out at the edges and weld the sandwich to the tin. Use a stiff set fruit jelly or a reduced jam, spread in the thinnest possible film, and leave a clear half-inch border all round.
- Puff pasteReady-rolled all-butter puff is a fair substitute for the homemade paste assumed here. A quarter of a pound is about 115 g, which is a small sheet — the recipe says only that it makes "a nice supper dish", so expect a handful of squares.
- Marking the squaresScore the top sheet only, before baking, cutting through the upper pastry but not into the jelly. Cutting cleanly through baked puff without scoring first shatters it.
- Press the edges, not the middleThe instruction to "press it lightly with the fingers" is probably about sealing the two sheets so the jelly stays put. Concentrate the pressure on the border and leave the centre alone so it can rise.
- Powdered sugarIn period usage this means finely crushed and sifted sugar, so either icing/confectioners' sugar or caster will serve; sift it over while the pastry is still warm so it adheres.
- ServingDishing on a neatly-folded napkin was a standard presentation convention of the period; a plate is fine. The whipped cream version wants the strips completely cold or the cream slumps.
- Cost8d is a period price, roughly the cost of a cheap supper dish in a late-Victorian household, and has no useful modern equivalent.
Cassell's places this among the small "supper dishes" — the light, sweet things brought out late in the evening, when a full meal would have been excessive. Recipes like this one exist partly to show off puff paste: rolled "as thin as a wafer", it puffs dramatically around a nearly invisible layer of jelly. The word "sandwich" here carries an extended sense of anything layered between two like pieces, not necessarily bread and not necessarily savoury; sweet pastry and cake sandwiches were common in nineteenth-century English cookery books, and the Victoria sandwich is the survivor of the type. The alternative finish — narrow strips piled in a ring with whipped cream poured into the centre — reflects the period taste for building a dish upward on the plate rather than laying it flat.