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Orange Sandwiches
Use orange marmalade for a filling for white or whole wheat bread sandwiches.
About as terse as a recipe can get, and it assumes conventions that a 1907 reader would have supplied without thinking. The gaps worth filling are in the bread, the butter and the shape.
- Butter the breadMany period sandwich chapters open with a general direction to cream the butter and spread it thinly to the edges before any filling goes on, though this recipe itself is silent on the point. Butter helps keep marmalade from soaking into the crumb.
- Bread thicknessThe recipe gives none, but a filling like this suits small tea-style sandwiches. Cut day-old bread as thin as the loaf will allow, roughly a quarter inch, and trim the crusts after filling rather than before so the slices hold their alignment.
- Marmalade consistencyA loose modern breakfast marmalade will run. Drain off any free syrup, or use a thick-set cut-peel marmalade; chopping the peel finer than it comes in the jar makes the sandwich easier to bite through cleanly.
- Whole wheat then and nowPeriod whole wheat loaves were not standardised, and many were coarser than a modern sandwich loaf. For this filling, pick something fine-crumbed and mild so the marmalade's bitterness reads.
- Cutting and servingCut in triangles, fingers or rounds and keep them covered until served, since cut edges dry out quickly. Roughly a scant tablespoon of marmalade per sandwich, so half a cup will fill about eight sandwiches, or a couple of dozen small pieces once cut.
- Why it sits among the saladsTiming -- nothing here needs cooking, so the only real question is assembly. Make these not long before serving; left overnight in the refrigerator the bread goes gummy where the fruit touches it.
Sandwiches turn up in the salad chapters of American cookbooks of the 1900s, a pairing often explained by the shared occasion: the ladies' luncheon, the afternoon tea, the church supper, where a plate of thin crustless sandwiches was served alongside a salad rather than as a meal in itself. Lowney's Cook Book was issued by the Walter M. Lowney Company of Boston, a chocolate manufacturer, and like other company-sponsored cookbooks of the era it padded its promotional confectionery recipes with a full course of ordinary household cookery so it could function as a real kitchen manual. Marmalade fillings were popular for this kind of sandwich precisely because a preserve was shelf-stable, kept its shape when spread, and asked nothing of the cook on a warm afternoon.