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Harlequin Sandwiches
Cut one-half-inch slices of both brown and white bread. Spread these slices with butter or cream cheese, as preferred, and place four of these thick slices one on top of the other, alternating the dark colored bread with the white. When well pressed together, slice through the four layers, cutting them into as thin slices as possible without allowing the slices to break. When neatly done, the effect is excellent, giving alternate layers of dark and light.
A construction technique more than a recipe: the finished sandwich is a striped slab cut across a stack, and everything depends on the bread and the chilling.
- Brown breadIn a 1900s American book this means a dark wheat or graham loaf, or a steamed Boston brown bread, not pumpernickel. Any firm wholemeal sandwich loaf gives the contrast intended; the darker the crumb, the sharper the stripe.
- Cream cheeseThe period product was a fresh, soft, unstabilised cheese, likely looser and more spreadable than modern block cream cheese. Modern block cream cheese works if beaten soft with a little cream so it spreads without tearing the crumb.
- Butter must be soft, not meltedThe spread is the glue holding four layers together through the cross-cut. Beat it to a mayonnaise consistency at room temperature; melted butter soaks in and the stack slides apart.
- Chill before the second cutThe recipe's hinge is the cross-cut through all four layers, and it is far easier on a stack that has been wrapped tightly and refrigerated an hour or more. Press it under a light weight — a board with a can on it — while it chills.
- Trim the crusts firstNot stated here, though crusts on the outside of the stack drag the knife and split the layers when you slice across them.
- The knifeA long, thin blade with a serrated edge, drawn rather than pressed, and wiped between cuts. A short chef's knife compresses the stack and smears the filling into the stripe.
- YieldFour half-inch slices make a stack about two inches thick; the recipe asks for the cross-cuts to be as thin as they will go without breaking, so the count depends on how thin you can slice and on the size of the loaf. Serve the day they are made — the cut faces stale quickly, so keep them under a damp cloth until serving.
The name comes from the Harlequin of the commedia dell'arte and the English pantomime, whose costume of contrasting diamonds made "harlequin" a standard nineteenth-century adjective for anything patterned in alternating colours — harlequin ices, harlequin cakes, harlequin sets of glass. Sandwiches like this belong to the elaborate turn-of-the-century tea table, when the sandwich had moved well beyond a slice of meat between bread and become an exercise in presentation: rolled, ribboned, cut with fancy cutters, checkerboarded. The Butterick Publishing Company, which made its money on dress patterns and The Delineator, was addressing exactly the reader who cared how a plate looked, and the striped-loaf trick survives essentially unchanged in the ribbon and pinwheel sandwiches of later American entertaining books.