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Five O'Clock Tea
Mash bananas fine, add an equal amount of mashed red raspberries, moisten with a little sweet thick cream. Place between thin slices of lightly buttered white bread. Cut in fancy shapes.
A tea-table sandwich with no measurements at all, which is normal for the genre — the proportions are one to one and the cream is added by eye. The only real difficulty is keeping the filling from soaking the bread.
- QuantitiesThe original gives none, because the filling is built to taste and consistency. Work to the one-to-one proportion the recipe states and add cream a little at a time; how much you need depends entirely on how thickly the sandwiches are filled.
- "Sweet thick cream"Sweet means unsoured, as opposed to the sour cream common in period kitchens; thick indicates a rich cream rather than a thin one, though there was no fixed standard. Use heavy or whipping cream, not half-and-half, and add it a teaspoon at a time — the fruit is already wet.
- Red raspberriesThe recipe assumes fresh summer berries. Frozen ones thaw into a great deal of juice; drain them well before mashing or the sandwich will not hold. Straining out some seeds gives a smoother filling.
- The hinge: assemble at the last minuteBanana and raspberry mash weeps steadily and will soften thin bread quickly. Buttering the bread to the edges helps seal it against the wet filling, and the sandwiches are best filled shortly before serving.
- BrowningMashed banana darkens on contact with air. A small squeeze of lemon juice into the mash slows it, and the raspberry colour masks most of the rest.
- Bread and "fancy shapes"A firm, close-crumbed white sandwich loaf sliced thin, crusts off. Cut rounds, diamonds or hearts with a cutter after filling, pressing down cleanly rather than sawing; expect a fair amount of waste in trimmings.
- ServingTwo or three pieces per person alongside savoury sandwiches. Cover with a barely damp towel until they go to the table, and do not attempt to hold them longer than an hour.
Sandwich books proliferated in the first decade of the twentieth century, when the afternoon tea had become a fixed social occasion and hostesses needed something small, sweet and manageable in a glove. Fruit sandwiches of this kind — mashed banana, crushed berries, chopped dates, all bound with cream — belong to that moment: bananas had become cheap and reliably available in northern cities through the expanding steamship trade of the 1880s and 1890s, and a fruit once treated as a novelty could suddenly be mashed by the cupful. The instruction to cut in fancy shapes seems to be the point of the whole exercise, suggesting that the food at a five o'clock tea was judged in no small part on how it looked on the plate.