Home › Sandwiches › Date-and-Ginger Sandwiches
Date-and-Ginger Sandwiches
Chop the dates and preserved ginger; moisten with syrup from the ginger jar and a little lemon juice; cook as above, and use with bread or ladyfingers. Preserved ginger may be used alone and without cooking.
A tea-table filling rather than a lunch sandwich, and one that depends entirely on the syrup from a jar of preserved ginger. The original leans on a previous entry for the cooking method, which was simply to stew the chopped fruit with the liquid until it thickened to a paste.
- "Cook as above"The method belongs to an earlier entry that is not reproduced here, so its details are unknown. In practice a filling of this kind is cooked gently and stirred until the fruit breaks down and the mixture is thick enough to hold its shape on a spoon. Keep the heat low: dates are high in sugar and catch quickly.
- Preserved gingerThis means stem ginger in heavy syrup, sold in jars (the period import came in glazed Canton stoneware). Crystallised ginger is not a substitute here because the recipe wants the syrup as the moistening liquid. If you have only crystallised, use it with a little honey thinned with water.
- ProportionsNone are given. Three parts pitted dates to one part drained ginger by weight is a workable balance; the ginger should be a warm background, not the main note. Start with a tablespoon of syrup per cup of chopped fruit and add more only if the paste is stiff.
- The lemon juiceNot optional in practice. Dates and ginger syrup together are cloying, and a teaspoon or two of lemon is what keeps the filling from tasting like candy.
- ChoppingDates go gummy in a food processor and will ball up around the blade. Chop by hand with an oiled knife, or pulse in short bursts with the ginger, which helps keep the mass loose.
- Bread or ladyfingersFor bread, use a fine-crumbed white loaf cut thin and crustless — the filling is heavy and coarse bread fights it. Ladyfingers are split lengthwise and sandwiched, which makes these closer to a petit four than a sandwich.
- Yield and keepingA cup of filling covers about a dozen small tea sandwiches or twenty ladyfinger halves. The cooked paste keeps a week refrigerated and spreads better warmed slightly; assemble no more than an hour or two ahead or the bread goes damp.
Light sweet sandwiches were standard at afternoon tea and at the late suppers that followed cards or the theatre. Preserved ginger was the luxury element: stem ginger in syrup was shipped from Canton in glazed stoneware jars and was a familiar sight in well-stocked American and British larders by the late nineteenth century, valued as much for its syrup as for the ginger itself. The note that ginger "may be used alone and without cooking" seems characteristic of books of this kind, which often appear to have offered the hostess a quick version alongside the deliberate one. Dates, meanwhile, were cheap and reliable imports, and cookbooks put them into everything from bread to salad he ssweetness some heat and kept the filling from being merely sugary.