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With French Fruit
Substitute candied fruit for the nuts and proceed as above, or use nuts and fruit together.
A one-line variation that assumes you have just read the preceding sandwich filling — almost certainly a soft cheese or butter creamed with chopped nuts. Everything hinges on knowing what "French fruit" meant and how finely to cut it.
- What "French fruit" isGlacé or candied fruit in the French style — crystallised cherries, apricots, angelica, citron, pineapple, sometimes a mixed "cut mixed peel". It is not fresh fruit, and not the dried fruit sold for baking. Look for glacé fruit at a baking supplier or in the holiday cake aisle.
- "Proceed as above"The base is the preceding recipe in the section, a nut filling; what the nuts were bound with is not stated here. Substitute an equal volume of fruit for the nuts, or split the measure between the two, as the line allows.
- Cut it smallCandied fruit is sticky and firm, and large pieces will drag the bread apart when the sandwich is cut. Chop to the size of a coarse pepper grind; a scattering of powdered sugar on the board keeps the knife from gumming.
- Balance the sweetnessGlacé fruit is far sweeter than the nuts it replaces. A cream cheese base takes it well; a plain butter base benefits from a pinch of salt or a squeeze of lemon to keep it from tasting like frosting.
- BreadSandwiches of this kind were generally cut thin and trimmed of crusts, though this line specifies nothing about the bread. A day-old loaf slices thinner than a fresh one.
- Yield and holdingNo quantities are given here; yield depends entirely on the base recipe. The filling keeps several days covered in the refrigerator; assembled sandwiches are best made the same day and kept under a damp cloth.
Candied fruit sandwiches belong to the American afternoon tea table of the turn of the century, when the sandwich had become a small, sweet, deliberately dainty thing served with tea or at a card party. "French fruit" was understood to mean glacé fruits preserved by repeated soaking in sugar syrup, a technique long associated with Provençal towns such as Apt, and such fruit was sold in American groceries as an imported confection. If the book is Janet McKenzie Hill's collection of salads, sandwiches and chafing-dish cookery, it is aimed at exactly that kind of entertaining, and its sandwich chapter runs in chains of variations like this one, each recipe leaning on the paragraph above it to save space.