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Cherry Sandwich No. 2
Chop a quarter of a pound of candied cherries fine; add a few drops of sherry. Mix and spread on rounds of lightly buttered white bread. Cover with another slice and garnish with a candied cherry. A
A tea sandwich in the plainest sense: chopped candied fruit bound with a little wine, on buttered white bread cut in rounds. The only real technique question is moisture control.
- Candied cherriesThese are what a modern shop sells as glace cherries — whole cherries cooked in heavy syrup and dried, not the wet maraschino sort in a jar. A quarter of a pound is roughly half a cup once chopped. Maraschino cherries will bleed and turn the bread pink and soggy.
- "A few drops" of sherryTaken literally: enough to loosen the chopped fruit into a spreadable paste, not enough to wet it. A teaspoon is usually the limit for this quantity. A medium or cream sherry suits the sweetness; a dry fino tastes thin against candied fruit.
- The butter mattersThe recipe butters the round lightly; buttering both cut faces will also help. Softened butter spread edge to edge should slow the syrupy filling soaking through.
- Cutting roundsCut the rounds from the buttered, filled sandwich or from the slices first, but do it with a plain cutter about 2 inches across and cut all rounds before assembling so the pairs match. Day-old firm white bread cuts far more cleanly than fresh.
- YieldA quarter pound of cherries fills about eight to ten 2-inch rounds, depending on how thickly it is spread — one modest plate for a tea, not a meal.
- Holding themMake no more than an hour or two ahead, arrange on a plate and cover with a slightly damp tea towel, then plastic wrap. The bread dries at the edges quickly once cut into small rounds.
- The stray "A"The lone letter at the end is a catchword or printer's artifact from the original page, not part of the instructions.
Sandwich books proliferated in America in the first decade of the twentieth century, when the afternoon tea and the ladies' luncheon gave hostesses a reason to need dozens of small, sweet, non-messy things to hand round — and when white bread, candied fruit and imported sherry were all within reach of a middle-class kitchen. Candied cherries had long been a confectioner's and cake-baker's staple, sold by weight from the same counters as citron and candied peel, so using them as a sandwich filling was less a new invention than an extension of an existing pantry item. That this recipe is numbered "No. 2" suggests something about how such books worked: they seem to have proceeded by permutation, expecting the reader to treat the collection as a set of variations rather than fixed formulas.