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French Fruit Sandwiches
Chop the fruit very fine; use a mixture of cherries, plums, pineapple and angelica root; moisten with wine, orange or lemon juice. Use lady-fingers or bread for the covering. If bread is used, spread lightly with butter; if cake be your choice, spread very lightly with marmalade. Use just enough butter or marmalade to keep the coverings together.
An unusually loose set of instructions even by 1900 standards — no quantities at all, and one ingredient that no longer sits on most spice shelves. A few decisions have to be made before you start.
- The fruit is candied, not freshThe fruit is most likely candied, not fresh -- cherries, plums, pineapple and angelica in one bowl points to glacé fruit from the confectioner, though the recipe does not say so outright. Fresh fruit chopped fine will weep straight through the bread; if you want fresh, drain it hard first.
- Angelica rootThe recipe says root, but what the market sold as "angelica" for cooks was the candied stem of Angelica archangelica, dyed bright green and used for decorating cakes. It is still available from baking suppliers. Do not substitute foraged angelica: the plant is easily confused with water hemlock.
- Lady-fingersSavoiardi or ladyfinger biscuits, split lengthwise or used in pairs as the top and bottom. Crisp Italian savoiardi hold up better than the soft sponge kind, which collapse into the filling.
- The wineA sweet wine is the obvious choice here: sherry, Madeira or a Muscat. Use it by the spoonful; the mixture should be just tacky, not wet, or the coverings will go to paste.
- "Just enough butter or marmalade"This is the hinge of the recipe. The butter or marmalade is adhesive, not flavour, and a thick layer makes the filling slide out on the first bite. Butter must be properly soft so you can spread a bare film without tearing the bread.
- Bread choiceIf you go the bread route, use a fine-crumbed white loaf, cut thin, crusts off. Anything with an open crumb lets the syrup through.
- Timing and yieldTiming -- assemble within an hour of serving; these do not hold. The recipe gives no quantities, so scale the filling to the number of sandwiches you want.
Fruit sandwiches belong to the era when the sandwich had migrated from the workingman's dinner pail to the afternoon tea table, cut small and crustless in many varieties, sweet and savoury. The giveaway is the candied fruit and angelica, all of it bought ready-made from a confectioner and normally destined for cake decoration. That the same page offers a choice between buttered bread and ladyfingers spread with marmalade shows how fluid the line between sandwich and petit four still was.