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Pint of milk, 1 cup sugar, 3 eggs, half a teacup of Five Roses flour. Mix sugar and flour thoroughly, then stir into the milk. Cook in double boiler to a thick paste. Add the eggs, well-beaten, just before removing from the fire. Let stand until cold. It is then ready for use for any kind of sweet sandwiches.
For instance, take a small portion of the paste and stir in a little vanilla and freshly-grated cocoanut, chocolate, preserved ginger or any kind of ground nuts. Black walnuts and roasted almonds are especially good. Jams, marmalade and orange may also be used in this way.
Cocoanut and orange make a delicious combination. Raisins and chopped nuts also go well together. The sandwiches may be made of crackers and wafers or white and brown bread.
This is a plain pastry cream — a flour-thickened custard — used as a base that gets flavoured in small batches for tea sandwiches. The whole recipe turns on how the eggs go in.
- The missing numberThe printed page gives no amount before "Pint of milk." One pint (2 cups) is the reading that best balances 1 cup sugar, 3 eggs and half a teacup of flour; much less milk would give a stiff paste rather than a spreadable one.
- Half a teacup of flourA 1913 teacup runs 5 to 6 fluid ounces, so half a teacup is roughly 1/3 cup, or about 40 g of flour. That is a light thickening; the eggs do much of the work.
- The hinge: adding the eggsBeaten eggs dropped straight into a near-boiling paste will scramble. Whisk a ladleful of the hot paste into the eggs first, return the mixture to the pan, and keep it moving over the water bath for two or three minutes until it reaches about 170F. That both sets the custard and takes the eggs to a safe temperature.
- Double boilerNot optional here. A flour-and-egg custard scorches on the bottom of a direct-heat pan, and the scorched flavour carries straight through the finished sandwich. Simmering water, not boiling, and stir constantly.
- CocoanutThe original means fresh coconut, grated on the spot — closer to moist shreds than to the dry sweetened flake sold in bags. Unsweetened desiccated coconut, briefly soaked in warm milk, is the nearer substitute; sweetened flake will push an already sweet filling further.
- Preserved gingerStem ginger in syrup, drained and finely chopped, not crystallized ginger and not ground. Chop it small or it tears the bread.
- Cooling and keepingPress plastic wrap onto the surface while it cools or a skin forms, and refrigerate. This is a fresh egg-and-milk custard with no acid or alcohol to protect it: use it within two days, and assemble the sandwiches the day they are served.
- YieldAbout 2 1/2 cups of paste — enough to fill roughly three dozen small tea sandwiches or cracker sandwiches, which is why the recipe tells you to flavour only "a small portion" at a time.
- AssemblySpread thin. Custard soaks bread quickly, so butter the bread lightly first if the sandwiches must stand, and trim crusts after filling rather than before.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Winnipeg and Montreal, whose Five Roses flour was one of the most widely sold brands in Canada; the book was distributed cheaply to promote the flour and reached a great many Canadian kitchens. Sandwiches of this kind belong to the afternoon-tea and card-party culture of the period, when a hostess was expected to produce a plate of small, prettily varied sandwiches, and one neutral base flavoured several ways is the logic behind the recipe's own list of coconut, chocolate, ginger, jam and nuts. The paste itself is a flour-thickened crème pâtissière, cheaper and more stable in a warm room than whipped cream or a butter filling.