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Lenox Sandwiches
1/4 cup almond paste 1/4 cup powdered sugar 3/8 cup heavy cream Salt to taste Mix thoroughly and spread between thin slices of buttered graham or white bread.
A sweet tea-sandwich filling that comes together in a bowl in two minutes. The only difficulty is getting almond paste and cream to combine without lumps.
- The hinge: soften the paste firstAlmond paste straight from the tube or can is stiff and will resist the cream, leaving grit. Break it up with the powdered sugar first, then work the cream in a spoonful at a time until smooth.
- 3/8 cupSix tablespoons. Add it gradually and stop when the mixture is spreadable rather than pourable.
- Almond paste is not marzipanAlmond paste carries a much higher proportion of almonds to sugar (depending on the maker, from roughly equal parts up to about two to one); marzipan is sweeter and firmer. If you substitute marzipan, cut back or drop the powdered sugar.
- Heavy cream, unwhippedThe recipe means liquid cream, used to loosen the paste. Whipping it first gives an airy filling that is more likely to separate and soak the bread as it stands.
- Salt to tasteA pinch, no more, but do not skip it; it is what keeps the filling from reading as pure sugar. Use fine salt so it dissolves.
- Graham breadGraham flour is coarse whole wheat, so any good whole-wheat sandwich loaf stands in. Day-old bread slices thinner and cleaner than fresh.
- Assembly and yieldThe measured ingredients come to a little under a cup, giving roughly three-quarters of a cup of filling once mixed, enough for six to eight small sandwiches. Butter the bread to the edges to keep the cream from soaking through, then trim crusts and cut into fingers or triangles.
- HoldingBest within a couple of hours. Cover with a barely damp towel under plastic if they must wait; refrigeration stales the bread quickly.
Almond-paste fillings belong to the era of the afternoon tea sandwich, when a hostess was expected to put out several kinds cut small and crustless, sweet ones alongside savoury. The name may refer to Lenox, Massachusetts, one of the Berkshire resort towns where wealthy summer visitors kept large staffed cottages through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries -- dishes named for such places often carried a whiff of that gentility -- though the recipe itself gives no source for the name. Almond paste was a comparatively costly grocery item, sold in tins and used mainly for cakes and confectionery, so spending a quarter cup of it on sandwiches was itself a small display. Offering graham bread as an alternative to white is characteristic of the period's enthusiasm for whole-grain flour as the more wholesome choice.