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Sandwiches (Easy to Make)
(1) Toasted Cracker Sandwiches--Spread soda crackers with grated cheese, moistened with a little oil and vinegar, cover with soda cracker and put into quick oven until cheese melts or until very crisp. (2) Toast crackers until very crisp--Spread crackers with cottage cheese or strawberry jam--serve hot. (3) Cut marshmallows into eighths. Spread on soda crackers and place in oven until marshmallows are melted. Sprinkle with finely chopped nuts and return to oven for 1 minute.
Three quick cracker canapes from the same idea: something that melts, on something crisp, straight from a hot oven. All three are a matter of two or three minutes' attention rather than a set baking time.
- Quick ovenRead this as roughly 400-450F. At that heat cheese melts in a few minutes and marshmallow slumps faster still, so work with the oven door within reach rather than a timer.
- Soda crackersClose to what a modern shop sells as saltines: thin, square, plain. Any plain cracker sturdy enough not to buckle under a topping will do.
- The cheese, moistenedThe oil and vinegar loosen the grated cheese so it spreads and melts into a mass rather than scattered shreds. Use a firm grating cheese, and add the liquid drop by drop until the shreds just clump; a wet paste will run off the cracker.
- Cottage cheese does not bakeIn the second version the crackers are toasted first and the topping goes on cold, so what is served hot is the cracker. Cottage cheese tends to weep and turn grainy if it is put into a hot oven.
- Cutting marshmallowsThe instruction to cut into eighths implies marshmallows considerably larger than modern miniatures, which need no cutting; standard-size ones quarter rather than eighth. A knife blade wiped with oil or dipped in hot water cuts them cleanly.
- The nuts go on last for a reasonChopped nuts scorch faster than marshmallow melts. The one-minute return to the oven is only to set them into the surface, and a minute at this heat is genuinely a minute.
- Yield and servingServing -- all three must be eaten hot or within a few minutes of leaving the oven, since the crackers soften as they cool and the marshmallow sets hard.
Cracker sandwiches belong to the era when the soda cracker was a staple of the American pantry, and books of this kind leaned on it as a base that needed no slicing and no stale-bread arithmetic. The marshmallow-and-nut version reflects the wider early twentieth-century habit of using cheap, shelf-stable commercial marshmallows outside the sweet course -- on sweet potatoes, in fruit salads and, as here, toasted on a cracker.