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Rose Sandwiches
Use thin-sliced bread. Spread with a very little butter (or none) adding a thin layer of cream cheese, then stiff raspberry jam. Cut the bread from each corner (diagonally) across, twice, forming triangles, or with cutters, in rounds. RASPBERRY JAM (Old English Recipe) No. I To every pound of raspberries allow a pound of sugar, and to whatever proportion of raspberries used allow onefourth weight of currants. Wash and strain currants and cook juice with the sugar about twenty minutes, then add the raspberries, whole, simmering together twenty-five minutes. Bottle and seal at once.
RASPBERRY JAM No. 2 AND No. 3 Make as for Blackberry Jam No. 1 and No. 2, or add equal quantity of gooseberries or strawberries.
RASPBERRY JAM No. 4 Weigh berries and simmer without water till reduced one-third, when add gradually as many pounds of heated sugar as there were berries (original weight). As soon as sugar is melted thoroughly and has boiled up once, place in jars and seal at once.
RASPBERRY JELLY No. I Make as for Currant Jelly No. 1.
RASPBERRY JELLY No. 2 Make as for Currant Jelly No. 1, using, however, but one pint of currant juice to two of raspberries.
Two things in one entry: an assembly note for a tea sandwich and four versions of raspberry jam to fill it. The sandwich lives or dies on the stiffness of the jam, so read the jam notes first.
- Stiff jam is the hingeA loose preserve will bleed pink into the crumb within minutes and the triangles will slump. Use a jam that holds a spoon-shape at room temperature, and chill it before spreading. The cream cheese layer may also help seal the bread against the jam, though the recipe says nothing about why it is there.
- Bread and cuttingThin-sliced means about 1/4 inch, from a close-grained sandwich loaf a day old; fresh bread tears. A 24-slice loaf yields roughly 48 triangles, or about 24 rounds with a 2-inch cutter, plus a good deal of waste.
- Cream cheese then and nowThe cream cheese of this period was a soft, fresh, unstabilised curd, often sold in small wrapped blocks and generally leaner and less firm than modern gum-thickened bricks; something like Neufchatel is a reasonable stand-in. Either works; beat it with a spoonful of cream so it spreads without dragging the bread.
- Currants as pectin in No. 1The quarter-weight of currants is not for flavour, it is the setting agent, and this is why the currant juice is boiled with the sugar first. Red currants are hard to find fresh; frozen ones work, and the strained juice of about 4 oz currants stands in for each pound of raspberries.
- The No. 1 timingsTwenty minutes for the juice and sugar, then twenty-five with the whole berries, is a long boil by current practice and will darken the fruit. Judge by set instead: a spoonful on a chilled plate should wrinkle when pushed. Whole berries survive better if you fold them in and hold at a bare simmer.
- Method No. 4 explainedReducing the berries by a third before any sugar goes in concentrates the natural pectin, which is why one boil-up after the sugar dissolves is enough. Heating the sugar beforehand keeps the pan from dropping off the boil. It may well set firmer than No. 1, which would suit the sandwiches.
- "Bottle and seal at once"This is open-kettle canning, which current guidance no longer accepts even for full-sugar jam; the seal is unreliable and surface mould is common. Fill sterilised jars, then process in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes, or simply refrigerate and use within a month.
- YieldA pound of raspberries with a pound of sugar gives roughly three half-pint jars (more with the currant juice of No. 1), far more than the sandwiches need. Something like half a cup of jam and 8 oz of cream cheese should be about enough for a full loaf.
This belongs to the great age of the fancy tea sandwich, when a hostess was expected to produce several kinds cut small and crustless for afternoon calls. Cream cheese made these possible on a domestic scale: fresh, unripened curd cheese had long been made at home, but by the late nineteenth century commercially wrapped cream cheese from New York State dairies was widely available, and it appears constantly in American sandwich recipes of the 1900s and 1910s as a spread, a binder and a barrier against damp fillings. The jam recipes clustered beneath it show how a fruit book of the period worked: one preserve is written out in full and the rest are cross-referenced to blackberry or currant, on the assumption that a cook who could set one soft fruit could set them all. The currant addition in No. 1, labelled an old English recipe, is a pre-commercial-pectin solution to a real problem, since raspberries alone set poorly and red currants are among the most pectin-rich fruits in the northern garden.