Home › Sandwiches › Lady-fingers (Cook the pineapple sugar)
Lady-fingers (Cook the pineapple sugar)
Cook the pineapple, sugar and lemon juice until thick; let cool, and spread upon ladyfingers or sponge drops. Press together in pairs and serve.
A sweet sandwich rather than a savory one: a thick pineapple marmalade used as filling between two ladyfingers. The original prints only the method, so the proportions are left to the cook.
- Missing quantitiesNo amounts are given here. A workable ratio for a thick spreading marmalade is about 2 cups crushed pineapple to 3/4 cup sugar and the juice of half a lemon, adjusted to taste.
- Sponge dropsThese are small rounds of sponge batter piped or dropped onto a baking sheet, essentially a ladyfinger made circular. Any crisp sponge biscuit, including commercial savoiardi, serves the same purpose.
- PineappleCanned pineapple, grated or shredded, was a common form in American kitchens at this date, though the recipe does not specify. Fresh works but should be finely chopped and may need longer cooking to thicken.
- Cooking to "thick"This is the hinge. The filling has to reach jam consistency, thick enough to hold a line when you draw a spoon across the pan bottom, or it will soak straight through the biscuits. Stir as it thickens, since it catches easily.
- Why the lemon juiceIt is there mainly for acidity, keeping the cooked fruit from tasting flat and cloying. Pineapple is low in pectin, so the thickening comes from cooking the fruit down rather than from a set.
- Cool completelyWarm filling steams the sponge and turns it to paste. Spread only when the marmalade is at room temperature, and assemble shortly before serving.
- YieldCount two biscuits per sandwich, as the recipe pairs them.
Sweet sandwiches like this one belong to the late-Victorian and Edwardian afternoon tea, where the word "sandwich" covered anything pressed between two thin surfaces, cake and biscuit as readily as bread. Janet McKenzie Hill's book, published at the turn of the twentieth century out of the Boston Cooking School circle, comes out of a moment when sandwich chapters were understood to cover exactly this range: potted meats and watercress alongside fruit pastes on ladyfingers. Canned pineapple made the filling possible for an ordinary household, and cookbooks of the period lean on it heavily for fillings, ices and salads. The ladyfinger itself, a piped sponge biscuit, is generally traced to the courts of Savoy, which is why it still travels under the name savoiardi in Italy.