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Raspberry Sandwiches
Take a piece of puff paste, after it is fully rolled and folded, then roll it out, one-fourth inch in thickness and fold it over evenly (like a sheet of paper). Now roll this out to an eighth of an inch in thickness and about twelve inches in width; now roll this up in a roll the same as you would a sheet of paper; this sheet of paste should be so arranged in size as to form a roll (when rolled up) of two inches or two and a half inches in diameter; when this is rolled up wet the edge so that it may not unfold again; next press it flat until you reduce it to about three-fonrths of an inch in thickness; now take a sharp knife and cut it off in slices one-fourth of inch in thickness, lay these on the pan, cut part down, give them room and they will then flow considerably. Now bake them. When baked dust them well with powdered sugar and return them to the oven, which must, in the mean time, be made very hot so as to melt the sugar, this giving them a fine glaze. If you have a salamander to hold over them it will glaze them quicker than the oven, but if you have no salamander, and can not get the oven hot enough, then wash them with the white of an egg, dust them with sugar and return them to the oven for a few minutes. When all this is done spread raspberry jam or jelly on them and stick two together. You can dish them up artistically as fancy directs. They make a pretty dish and are all that can be desired in point of eating, and are a favorite on all French tables.
This is a puff-paste sandwich cookie — essentially a flattened palmier baked, glazed, and sandwiched with jam. The whole recipe hinges on keeping the paste cold enough that the rolled spiral holds its shape.
- Puff paste"After it is fully rolled and folded" means a fully laminated dough that has had its final turn and rested. All-butter frozen puff pastry is a fair substitute; roll to the thicknesses given rather than using the sheet as sold.
- Keep it coldThe dough is handled a great deal here — rolled, folded, rolled again, coiled, then pressed flat. Chill the coiled log for 30 minutes before slicing, or the butter softens and the layers merge instead of rising.
- Oven temperatureThe recipe gives no temperature or time; it only calls for the oven to be made "very hot" later, for the glazing. A hot oven in the region of 400-425F for roughly 12-15 minutes, until deeply puffed and browned through, suits puff paste; underbaked puff paste collapses.
- "They will then flow considerably"The slices spread wide as they bake, so give each at least two inches of clearance. Use parchment; the sugar glaze will scorch onto a bare pan.
- The salamanderA salamander was an iron plate on a long handle heated in the fire and held over food to brown the surface — the ancestor of the broiler. A broiler set to high, watched constantly, does the same job in under a minute.
- Powdered sugarPeriod powdered sugar was often loaf or lump sugar pounded and sifted, whether at home or by the grocer, and contained no cornstarch. Modern confectioners' sugar melts and glazes readily in its place.
- AssemblingFill only after the glazed halves are fully cool, and only shortly before serving. Jam sitting against warm pastry turns the layers soggy within the hour.
- YieldThe recipe is ambiguous about which dimension the twelve inches refers to, so the yield is uncertain: if the finished log is twelve inches long, quarter-inch slices give something like forty pieces, or around twenty sandwiches; if the twelve inches is the sheet that gets rolled up, the log's length — and so the count — is unstated.
What is described here is close kin to the palmier: puff paste rolled into a spiral, cut, pressed flat and baked so the sugar on the surface caramelizes. The author's remark that they are "a favorite on all French tables" fits a common habit in American cookbooks of the 1870s and 80s, which frequently credited fine pastry work to French confectioners. The Dixie Cook Book (1883) pairs plain Southern household cooking with a pastry section written at a distinctly more ambitious level, complete with a salamander that few of its readers would have owned. Raspberry jam and jelly were commonly stocked preserves, and their sharpness cuts the butter of the paste.