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Cocoanut Sandwiches
A cup of freshly-grated cocoanut, half a cup of nuts ground fine, 1 teaspoon lemon juice, 2 teaspoons powdered sugar and 3 tablespoons thick cream worked in. Spread between wafers or between bread and butter.
A sweet spread rather than a sandwich in the savoury sense, meant for afternoon tea. The whole thing hinges on the coconut being moist enough to bind.
- Freshly-grated cocoanutThis means the flesh of a whole coconut, grated on a box grater — moist, slightly sweet, and nothing like the dry sweetened shreds sold in bags. Frozen grated coconut from an Asian or Latin grocery is the closest substitute; unsweetened desiccated coconut works if you soak it in a little warm milk or cream first and squeeze it out.
- Nuts ground fineThe book does not specify a variety; walnuts, almonds or pecans are all plausible for the period. Grind in short pulses and stop before the nuts turn to butter, or the filling will be oily rather than light.
- Thick creamHeavy or double cream, unwhipped. Three tablespoons is a starting point — add it gradually until the mixture just holds together and spreads without tearing the bread. Very dry coconut may take twice as much.
- Powdered sugarIn this period "powdered sugar" generally meant finely ground granulated sugar; modern confectioners' sugar serves the same purpose and dissolves into the cream instead of leaving grit. Two teaspoons is barely sweet by modern standards; taste and adjust, remembering that bagged coconut is already sweetened.
- WafersThin plain biscuits of the water-cracker or tea-wafer sort, not modern sugar wafers. For bread, use a fine-crumbed white loaf sliced thin, buttered to the edges so the cream filling does not soak through.
- Yield and timingAround a cup and a half of filling — enough for roughly a dozen small sandwiches once the crusts are trimmed. Assemble no more than an hour or two before serving and keep them covered with a damp cloth in the refrigerator; the cream and fresh coconut both go off quickly at room temperature.
Sandwich chapters in Canadian and American cookbooks of the 1910s and 1920s ran to dozens of fillings, and a large share of them were sweet — dates, figs, maraschino cherries, nuts, marshmallow. These were the food of the afternoon tea and the church social rather than the lunch pail, cut small and crustless. Coconut appears often in this era because it travelled well and had become cheap and widely available in North American groceries, both whole and desiccated; the instruction to grate it freshly suggests the compiler thought the packaged product a poor second. The Five Roses Cook Book itself was produced by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company and distributed to purchasers of its flour, drawing many of its recipes from housewives across Canada, which is why short, unfussy entries like this one sit alongside more elaborate baking.