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Bread Cornucopia
Take a loaf of fresh sandwich bread, cut off the crust, making a square loaf without any crust.
For each cornucopia, butter the end of the loaf thickly with soft butter and then cut a thin slice, shape in the form of a cornucopia, lapping the bread over so the butter will stick the bread together. Fill with cream cheese that has been colored with just a speck of green coloring paste. If the cornucopias do not hold their shape well, fasten each one with a wooden toothpick, having it show on one side only. This may serve as a handle as these cornucopias are very nice served at afternoon tea and may be filled with different varieties of mousse.
A shaped tea sandwich rather than a cooked dish, and it stands or falls on the bread. The technique is the old trick of buttering the cut face of the loaf before slicing, so every slice arrives already buttered edge to edge.
- The hinge: butter first, slice secondButter the exposed end of the loaf thickly, then cut your slice off that end. The butter reaches the very edges, which is what glues the overlap of the cone. Buttering a loose slice afterwards leaves dry margins and the cornucopia springs open.
- Bread choice"Sandwich bread" here means a fine, close-grained white pan loaf, unsliced and fresh, as the recipe specifies. Modern artisan loaves with an open crumb tear when rolled. A soft supermarket pullman or a Japanese milk bread rolls best; slice as thinly as you can manage, thinner than typical bagged pre-sliced bread.
- Making the bread pliableIf slices crack at the overlap, roll each one lightly with a rolling pin before shaping. Cold bread from the freezer also slices thinner and more cleanly than room-temperature bread.
- Green colouring pasteAs the editor's note says, paste colours are far stronger than liquid drops. Take it up on the tip of a knife and beat it into the cheese thoroughly before judging the shade; the target is a pale spring green, not a bright one. A drop or two of liquid colour will do the same job but slackens the filling slightly.
- Cream cheeseCream cheese of the period was probably softer than the firm block sold today. Beat modern block cream cheese with a spoonful of cream or milk until it pipes smoothly, otherwise it will tear the bread going in. A piping bag makes filling the cone easier, though the recipe says nothing about the finish.
- FasteningA cocktail stick through one side only, as directed, keeps the seam closed and gives something to hold. Warn guests it is there, and pull it before eating rather than biting around it.
- The mousse variation"Mousse" is left unspecified and could be savoury (salmon, ham, chicken liver, set with a little gelatine and folded with whipped cream) or sweet. Fill these no more than an hour ahead and keep them chilled; a soft filling will soak the bread through in an afternoon.
- Yield and holdingHolding -- Yield depends on the loaf and how thinly you can slice it. Assemble them on a tray, cover with a barely damp cloth over waxed paper (never directly on the bread) and refrigerate up to two hours before serving.
Shaped and rolled tea sandwiches were a fixture of American entertaining between the wars, when a hostess was judged partly on how far she could get bread from the shape of a slice: pinwheels, ribbon sandwiches in alternating white and brown, checkerboards, and cones like this one. The cornucopia — the horn of plenty of classical iconography, long borrowed by confectioners and pastry cooks for filled cone shapes — was among the more ambitious, since it demands a very thin slice and a filling stiff enough to hold. Tinting the cheese a faint green belongs to the same decorative impulse that produced pastel mints and coloured aspics on the same tables. The dish is assembled rather than baked: everything here is done with a knife and a refrigerator.