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Strawberry Sandwiches
1/2 cupful soft butter; add 7 cleaned berries, 1 cupful confectioners' sugar, tablespoonful lemon juice; mash; set on ice to chill; spread crustless fresh bread and roll; pin in cloth for three hours. Arrange in a pyramid on a lace-paper doily and decorate with whole berries and their foliage.
This is a strawberry butter spread on soft bread and rolled — a tea-table sandwich rather than lunch. The success or failure is entirely in the moisture: mashed berries will soak the bread if the butter is not cold and firm when it goes on.
- Chill the butter twiceChill the butter -- Cream the butter, work in the sugar, then the mashed berries and lemon juice, and refrigerate until it is firm enough to spread without tearing bread. "Set on ice" meant an icebox; the coldest part of a modern refrigerator serves the same purpose. Spreading it soft is what produces a soggy roll.
- QuantitiesHalf a cup of butter is 4 oz or one stick. A cupful of confectioners' sugar is about 4 oz; the mixture will be very sweet and quite stiff, which is intentional. Seven berries is a small handful — roughly 2 to 3 tablespoons of pulp once mashed.
- Drain the berriesModern cultivated strawberries may run juicier than the small berries this recipe assumes. Mash them, let them sit in a sieve for a few minutes, and discard the free juice before beating them into the butter.
- The breadUse a fine-crumbed white sandwich loaf, sliced thin — about 1/4 inch — with crusts cut off after slicing, not before. If the slices resist rolling, flatten each one lightly with a rolling pin.
- "Pin in a cloth"The rolled sandwiches are laid seam-down, wrapped in a cloth, and pinned so they hold their shape as the butter sets. A lightly dampened tea towel inside a covered container, refrigerated, does the same job. The recipe calls for three hours.
- Yield and servingThis much filling covers roughly 12 to 16 thin slices, giving 12 to 16 rolls. Serve the day they are made, cold, with the garnish of whole hulled berries and clean strawberry leaves added at the last moment.
Rolled sandwiches like this belong to the era of the formal afternoon tea, when a sandwich was a delicate thing built for a plate of assorted small food rather than a meal in itself. Fruit butters — berries, dates, figs or nuts creamed into sweetened butter — appear repeatedly in American household compilations of the period, and confectioners' sugar suited them: fine enough to dissolve into cold butter without graininess. The finishing instruction is as much of the recipe as the filling. A pyramid on a lace-paper doily, decorated with whole berries and their own foliage, was a presentation of the sort books of this kind favoured, assuming a hostess who cared how the plate looked from across the room.