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Ginger Sandwiches
Use finely chopped Canton ginger for a filling for graham bread sandwiches.
A one-line instruction of the kind that assumes a well-stocked 1900s pantry. Two of the three ingredients need translating.
- Canton gingerYoung ginger preserved in heavy syrup, sold in the period in squat glazed stoneware jars from Canton (Guangzhou). Modern preserved stem ginger in syrup is the same thing; crystallised ginger will work but is drier and much sweeter.
- Drain it firstThe hinge of the whole thing. Ginger straight from the syrup will soak the bread through within minutes. Blot the chopped pieces on paper before they go anywhere near the slices.
- Graham breadA slightly sweet whole-wheat loaf made with coarse graham flour, standard on tea tables of the period. A dense whole-wheat sandwich loaf is the closest supermarket equivalent.
- It needs a binderChopped ginger alone will not hold. Other cookbooks of the period work similar fillings into softened butter or cream cheese, and that is the practical route here, though this recipe says nothing about it.
- Cut and keepCrusts off, cut into fingers or triangles. Assembled and wrapped in a damp cloth in the refrigerator they hold a few hours, no more.
- YieldAbout a third of a cup of drained chopped ginger fills six slices, giving roughly a dozen small tea sandwiches.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard for the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and published in 1907 — one of the many house cookbooks issued by American food firms to encourage use of their products, though its scope runs far past chocolate. Preserved Canton ginger reached the United States through the China trade and was familiar enough by the 1900s to appear in tea sandwiches, at the sweeter end of an otherwise savoury genre. The pairing with graham bread reflects the period's enthusiasm for whole-meal flour, promoted from the 1830s by the temperance preacher Sylvester Graham and still carrying an air of wholesomeness at the ladies' luncheon table seventy years later.