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Surprise Sandwiches
Take orange marmalade, pecan nuts and cream cheese in equal quantities and after mixing thoroughly spread on thin slices of buttered bread.
A tea-table sandwich filling of three ingredients, with almost nothing said about proportion or handling. The whole success of it rests on how finely the nuts are cut and how soft the cheese is.
- "Equal quantities" is ambiguousThe original does not say whether it means by weight or by volume, and the two give quite different results — pecans are bulky and light. A workable reading is equal volumes: about 1/3 cup each of marmalade, chopped pecans and cream cheese, which fills roughly six small sandwiches.
- Cream cheese then and nowCream cheese of the sort meant here would have been a fresh, soft, lightly acid curd, generally softer and less firm-setting than the stabilised block cheese sold today. Bring modern cream cheese fully to room temperature and beat it smooth before adding anything, or it will tear the bread.
- Chop the pecans fineThis is the hinge. Halves or coarse pieces will push through thin bread and make the sandwich impossible to cut cleanly; chop to about the size of coarse sand.
- Marmalade and moistureThick-cut marmalade with long peel behaves badly in a spread. Chop the peel, or use a fine-cut marmalade, and if the mixture looks loose, chill it half an hour before spreading so it firms up.
- Buttered bread is not optionalThe butter is a moisture barrier between the marmalade and the crumb. Butter thinly but right to the edges, or the bread will go damp within the hour.
- Assembly and servingUse a close-crumbed white sandwich loaf sliced thin, trim the crusts after filling rather than before, and cut into triangles or fingers. Made no more than two or three hours ahead and kept covered with a damp cloth in the refrigerator.
Sandwiches like this one — cream cheese cut with a preserve, a chopped nut, sometimes a little chopped date or ginger — are generally said to have proliferated in American cookbooks from roughly the 1890s onward, a spread often traced to the availability of mass-produced fresh cream cheese in foil-wrapped bars, which would have put a spreadable soft cheese within year-round reach of anyone near a grocery. The name "surprise" seems to have been applied loosely in this era to dishes whose filling was concealed, and it turns up attached to everything from stuffed baked potatoes to layer cakes; here it appears to mean simply that the bread gives no hint of what is inside.