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Other Cheese Fillings
Cream cheese and minced walnuts.
Cream cheese and jam.
Cream cheese and olives partly chopped. Do not butter the bread for this recipe.
Cream cheese and peach marmalade.
Cream cheese and thin slices of preserved ginger. Lay the ginger over the cheese, not mixing the two together so as to confuse the flavors.
Crisp and tender radishes, chopped fine, chilled on ice and afterwards mixed with grated cheese.
Mince pineapple and cheese.
A list of fillings rather than a formula: no quantities are given, and none are really needed. What matters is the moisture balance, since every one of these mixtures can turn a thin slice of bread to paste within the hour.
- Cream cheeseIn a 1913 Canadian kitchen this means a fresh unripened cheese, either the commercial Philadelphia-style brick or a soft farm cheese drained from clabbered milk. Modern block cream cheese works directly; whipped tub cheese carries too much air and water and will soak the bread.
- Grated cheeseThe radish filling calls for grated rather than cream cheese, which points to something firmer, probably a cheddar, though the recipe does not say. Grate it fine and bind with a little softened butter or cream, or it will not hold together on the bread.
- The no-butter instructionButter was commonly spread on sandwich bread to keep filling from soaking into the crumb. The direction to omit it follows the olive filling and most likely applies to that one alone; the text gives no reason. Butter the others, particularly the jam and marmalade versions.
- Preserved gingerStem ginger in heavy syrup, sold in jars or crocks at the time and still available. Drain it well and slice it thin. The instruction to lay it over the cheese rather than stir it in is the one direction here worth following exactly, since mixed in it simply reads as sweet heat.
- RadishesChop, salt lightly, let them weep for ten minutes, then press dry in a towel before chilling. Undrained radish will flood grated cheese and the sandwich falls apart. The original's chilling on ice is for crispness, not safety.
- PineappleFresh pineapple contains bromelain, an enzyme that breaks down protein and can turn dairy bitter and thin on standing. Use canned crushed pineapple squeezed dry, or assemble fresh ones shortly before serving.
- Bread and yieldThin-sliced white bread, crusts off, cut into fingers or triangles. Roughly 1/2 cup of filling covers eight slices, giving sixteen to twenty-four small sandwiches. Cover with a damp cloth or waxed paper until served; these dry out faster than any other kind.
The Five Roses Cook Book was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company to sell flour, and its sandwich recipes belong to a distinctly Edwardian moment when the afternoon tea table, the bridge party and the church social all demanded small crustless sandwiches that could be made an hour ahead. Cream cheese fillings were a mainstay of that repertoire, and commercially made fresh cheese is generally said to have become widely available in North America around this period, in a form that spread without further work. The pairings here umted walnuts, olives, preserved ginger, pineapple emre suggestive of what a well-stocked Canadian pantry might have held at the time: nuts and imported jarred ginger from the grocer, canned pineapple from the new tropical trade, jam and marmalade from the household's own summer preserving. The instruction not to confuse the flavors of cheese and ginger is a small piece of genuine cooking judgment in a book otherwise written to move sacks of flour.