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Sweet Pepper Sandwiches
1 small can pimientos 3/4 cup sugar 1/2 cup vinegar 6 slices whole wheat bread 6 slices white bread 1/2 cup butter, creamed Drain pimientos and put through food chopper. Add sugar and vinegar. Stir until sugar is dissolved, then boil gently until the consistency of jam. Remove crusts from bread and spread with creamed butter. On slice of dark bread, spread the pepper filling, cover with slice of white bread, spread this again with butter and filling and cover with the whole wheat bread. Alternate, using a slice of whole wheat as a center slice. Wrap the sandwiches in a damp cloth, weight down and chill. Slice across in ribbons to serve.
A ribbon sandwich: layered loaf slices, chilled under weight, then cut across so each portion shows stripes of dark and light bread. The filling is essentially a sweet-sour pimiento jam.
- The can sizeA "small can" of pimientos in this period is usually about 4 ounces, a size still sold today. Drained and chopped that gives roughly half a cup, which has to stretch across all the filling layers -- twelve slices of bread means eight spread faces of filling.
- Cook the filling down properlyThis is the hinge. Three-quarters cup sugar to half a cup vinegar with so little pulp reduces fast, and it must reach true jam thickness or it will soak into the bread and the ribbons will fall apart. Expect 10 to 20 minutes over low heat, stirring near the end, and let it cool completely before spreading.
- Food chopperThe hand-cranked grinder can be replaced by a few pulses in a food processor or simply fine chopping by hand. Do not purée it to liquid; a little texture holds the filling together.
- Butter as a sealThe butter is creamed, not melted, and spread edge to edge on every cut face. It waterproofs the crumb against the vinegar syrup, so do not skimp or use it soft to the point of oiliness.
- Weighting and chillingA damp cloth keeps the crust-free edges from drying; a flat pan or board with a couple of cans on top is enough weight. Two hours in the refrigerator is the minimum, overnight is better, and a firm chilled loaf slices cleanly with a long serrated knife.
- SweetnessThree-quarters cup sugar reads very sweet to modern palates, and the result is closer to a preserve than a relish. Ribbon sandwiches of this kind were generally tea-tray food, though this recipe does not say so.
- YieldTwelve slices of bread build four stacks of three layers each. Cut across in half-inch ribbons, that gives a plateful of small sandwiches, the exact count depending on the width of the bread.
Ribbon and pinwheel sandwiches belong to the era of the bridge party and the afternoon tea tray, when sandwiches were judged as much by cross-section as by flavor, and cookbooks that called themselves "modern" or "modernistic" leaned hard on geometry and color contrast. Canned pimientos made that possible: cheap, uniformly scarlet, available year-round after Spanish sweet pepper varieties were established in Georgia in the early twentieth century, and by the 1920s a fixture of American home cooking in cheese spreads, deviled fillings, and relishes. Cooking them down with sugar and vinegar follows the old logic of sweet pepper jam or pepper relish, here scaled to a spreadable quantity. The alternating whole wheat and white loaves reflect a period fondness for two-toned effects on the plate, the same impulse that produced checkerboard sandwiches and marbled cakes.