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French Sandwiches
With cooky cutter stamp out thin slices of white bread made with Five Roses flour.
Spread half with cream cheese and currant jelly blended to a pink cream. On top of this spread a second round of bread lightly buttered and spread with chopped pistachio nuts.
A two-tone tea sandwich that depends entirely on how thin the bread is cut and how firm the filling is. Nothing here is difficult, but the assembly order in the original is worth reading twice.
- Read the assembly carefullyThe wording is ambiguous: the second round is buttered and spread with chopped pistachios, but the original does not say which face is buttered or which way up it sits. The most likely reading is that the butter holds the nuts, leaving a nut-topped open sandwich; if you would rather have a closed one, put the nuts inside and press.
- BreadA close-grained white sandwich loaf, a day old, cuts far cleaner than fresh. Slice about 1/4 inch and stamp the rounds with a 1.5–2 inch cutter; chilling or briefly freezing the loaf stops it tearing.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian hard spring-wheat flour brand, and the book exists to sell it. Any decent white loaf works; nothing in the recipe depends on the brand.
- Cream cheeseIn this period the term meant an unripened fresh cheese, often sold in small blocks and generally softer and wetter than a modern foil brick. Beat a modern block with a spoonful of cream until it takes jelly smoothly without tearing the bread.
- Currant jellyRed currant jelly, tart and firm-set — not jam and not blackcurrant preserve. Work it into the cheese a little at a time; too much liquid and the filling weeps into the bread. Rough proportions are about 1 part jelly to 3 parts cheese, enough to tint it pink.
- PistachiosUse unsalted, unroasted nuts if you want the green colour the recipe is after; roasted and salted ones look brown and read as savoury against the sweet filling. Chop fine by hand rather than in a processor, which turns them to paste.
- Yield and holdingOne standard loaf gives roughly 30–40 rounds depending on the cutter, and each sandwich uses two. Assemble within a couple of hours of serving and keep them covered with a damp cloth in the refrigerator; the cut edges dry out fast.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and distributed to Canadian households that bought its flour — a promotional cookbook, compiled in large part from recipes sent in by customers, which is why the same book carries plain bread doughs alongside fussy trifles like this. "Dainty sandwiches" belonged to the afternoon-tea and reception table of the early twentieth century, where the point was colour and neatness rather than sustenance: pinwheels, ribbon sandwiches, rounds stamped with a cooky cutter and tinted with beet juice, jelly or paprika. The pink-and-green pairing here is decorative arithmetic more than cookery. Calling them "French" was common shorthand of the period for anything considered elegant or continental, and generally signals ambition rather than any documented French origin.'