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Ginger Creams
3 ounces cream cheese 2 tablespoons finely chopped preserved ginger 1 tablespoon cream Mix cheese, cream and ginger and spread generously on thin slices of buttered whole wheat bread. Cut in fancy shapes.
A tea sandwich filling of three ingredients, from the era when cream cheese came in small foil-wrapped bricks and preserved ginger sat in a stoneware jar on the pantry shelf. The whole thing takes five minutes once the cheese is soft.
- Soften the cheese firstCold cream cheese will tear thin bread rather than spread on it. Let the 3 ounces come to room temperature for half an hour, then beat it smooth with the cream before the ginger goes in.
- What preserved ginger isThis means ginger in heavy syrup, sold in jars, not crystallised ginger rolled in sugar and not fresh root. Crystallised will work but is drier and much sweeter; drain syruped ginger well and chop it fine or it will lump in the spread.
- Cream cheese then and nowPeriod cream cheese was a fresh, softer, less gummy product than the stabilised block sold today. A modern brick works, but full-fat rather than whipped or spreadable tub cheese gives the body the filling needs.
- Cream means heavy creamCream -- The recipe does not specify which; light or heavy will both loosen the paste. If the mixture still resists, add a little more cream rather than more ginger.
- The breadWhole wheat is what the recipe calls for, and its nuttiness sits well against the sweet ginger. Slice thin, butter to the edges so the filling does not soak in, and use bread a day old, which cuts more cleanly than fresh.
- Cutting fancy shapesCut only after assembling, with a sharp thin knife or a small cutter, and trim crusts last. Scraps are worth keeping for crumbs.
- Yield and holdingEnough for perhaps half a dozen to eight thin slices, depending on how generously it is spread; the number of finished shapes depends on the cutter. Assemble no more than a couple of hours ahead and keep them covered with a damp cloth under plastic in the refrigerator, or the edges dry and curl.
Sweet cream cheese sandwiches on thin brown bread belong to the long American vogue for afternoon tea and bridge-luncheon food that ran from the 1890s well into the 1930s, when a hostess was judged partly on how small and how varied her sandwiches were. Preserved ginger, imported in syrup or in the familiar squat Canton jars, was one of the few reliably exotic sweets in an ordinary pantry and turns up in cookbooks of the period paired with cream cheese, nuts or dates. In the interwar decades the modern hostess was expected to serve small, decorative, quickly assembled food rather than the heavy set pieces of her mother's table, and a three-ingredient spread cut in fancy shapes was exactly that ideal.