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Whipped-Cream Sandwiches with French Fruit
Soak half a cup of fine-cut candied fruit in wine an hour or more. Prepare the cream as above, and sprinkle the same with the fruit before putting the sandwiches together.
A variation entry that leans on the preceding recipe for its base, so read it as an instruction to fold soaked candied fruit into sweetened whipped cream and spread it on thin bread. Everything about it depends on assembling at the last minute.
- "Cream as above"The base is the whipped cream of the preceding recipe, which is not reproduced here; assume cream whipped stiff and lightly sweetened. Use cream of at least 36% fat; ultra-pasteurised cream whips but weeps faster, which matters in a sandwich.
- French fruitThis means candied or glacé fruit — cherries, apricot, angelica, citron, orange peel — not fresh fruit and not dried fruit. Better to buy whole glacé fruit and cut it fine yourself; pre-diced "fruitcake mix" is often padded out with cheaper fruit and has little flavour.
- Half a cup, cut fineAbout 3 oz of fruit chopped to roughly pea size or smaller. Larger pieces tear the bread and roll out from between the slices when the sandwich is bitten.
- The wineUnspecified in the original. Sherry or madeira are in keeping. Drain the fruit well and blot it before it meets the cream — excess liquid will slacken whipped cream within minutes.
- BreadThe original does not specify; thin-cut white bread with crusts off is the usual choice for such sandwiches, and buttering the facing sides helps keep the cream from soaking the crumb.
- TimingAssemble no more than 30 minutes before serving and keep them covered and chilled. Whipped cream sandwiches collapse; there is no making these in the morning for an afternoon party. Stabilising the cream with a teaspoon of gelatine bloomed and melted, or using mascarpone-lightened cream, buys an hour if you need it.
- YieldThe original gives no cream quantity; half a cup of fruit with roughly a cup of cream, whipped, would fill something like 12 to 16 small tea sandwiches cut in triangles or fingers.
Sweet sandwiches sat comfortably in the American tea and reception repertoire around 1900, where the sandwich was understood as any thin buttered bread with something between it rather than a savoury lunch item. "French fruit" was used for candied whole fruits, a trade associated particularly with Apt and the Provençal confiseurs, and candied fruit was a familiar fancy-grocery import in American cities, sold by the pound for cakes, ices and party dishes. The reliance on an unspecified "wine" for the soak is also of its period, when such books often left the choice of sherry or madeira to the cook.