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Candied Cherry Sandwich
Chop candied cherries very fine, add as many seeded raisins chopped fine, moisten with orange juice. Mix to a paste and spread on thin slices of white bread lightly buttered. Put two slices together and garnish top with a cherry.
A tea-table sandwich that depends entirely on the texture of the paste: too little juice and it crumbles, too much and it soaks the bread.
- Candied cherriesThese are glacé cherries, sold whole in tubs near the baking supplies, not maraschino cherries in syrup. Maraschinos are wet and will thin the paste to a slurry.
- Chop, don't processA food processor turns candied fruit and raisins into a sticky ball that will not spread. Chop by hand with a heavy knife, dipping the blade in cold water when the fruit clings.
- Seeded raisinsIn 1909 that meant raisins with the seeds removed, commonly muscatels, by then largely done by machine rather than by hand. Ordinary seedless dark raisins are the direct substitute; golden raisins keep the color closer to the cherries.
- Orange juice, sparinglyThe recipe gives no quantities. Add the juice a teaspoon at a time until the mixture just holds together; it takes very little.
- Butter is structuralThe thin film of butter is what keeps the fruit's moisture out of the crumb. Butter to the very edges and use soft, spreadable butter so the bread does not tear.
- BreadA close-grained white sandwich loaf, sliced thin, is what the book assumes. Cut crusts off after assembling rather than before, and press the two slices together firmly before cutting.
- Yield and holdingCut into halves or fingers for a tea plate. They can be made an hour or two ahead if covered with a barely damp towel, but not overnight.
- The garnishA cherry set on a buttered sandwich top will slide. Half a cherry pressed cut-side down, or anchored with a dab of the paste, stays put.
This comes from Eva Greene Fuller's The Up-to-Date Sandwich Book (1909), which appeared at the height of the American sandwich craze, when the afternoon tea and the ladies' luncheon created demand for dozens of small, sweet, crustless variations. Candied cherries and seeded raisins turn up repeatedly in sandwich books of the period, alongside other preserved fruit. The formula here is typical of the genre: a chopped fruit paste bound with citrus juice, spread thin on buttered white bread, closer to a confection than to a meal. Recipes of this shape are generally traced to the same impulse that produced date and fig sandwiches.