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Ginger and Orange Sandwich
Soften Neufchatel cheese with a little cream; spread on thin slices of white bread and cover with finely minced candied orange peel and preserved ginger; cover with another slice of bread and garnish with a spray of maidenhair fern.
A tea sandwich, not a lunch sandwich: thin bread, a soft cheese binder, and two candied fruits doing all the work. The only real technique is getting the mince fine enough that the filling sits flat.
- Mince it smallCandied peel and preserved ginger are both sticky and springy, and coarse pieces will roll out from between the slices when you cut the sandwich. Chop them fine, and dust the knife or your fingers with a little powdered sugar to stop them clumping.
- NeufchâtelNeuchâtel -- The American Neufchâtel of this period is a fresh, soft, unripened cheese, essentially cream cheese with less butterfat — not the bloomy-rind French Neufchâtel of Normandy. The cheese still sold in US groceries under that name, usually in a foil-wrapped block, is the closest equivalent and is what to use; full-fat cream cheese also works and needs less cream to loosen it.
- How much creamAdd it a teaspoon at a time. You want the cheese just spreadable on thin bread without tearing it — loose enough to spread cold, stiff enough not to soak in.
- Preserved gingerThis means stem ginger in heavy syrup, sold in jars, or the drier crystallised ginger. Either is fine; drain and blot syrup-packed ginger well or the filling will weep.
- The breadCut from a close-grained white loaf a day old — fresh bread compresses and tears under a knife. Slice thin, spread, assemble, then trim the crusts and cut into fingers or triangles after filling, which gives clean edges.
- The fern is sceneryMaidenhair fern was standard plate decoration in this era and is not meant to be eaten. If garnishing, keep it beside the sandwiches rather than on them.
- Yield and holdingFigure three or four small tea sandwiches per slice pair; a batch for six people is roughly a dozen slices of bread. Assemble no more than an hour or two ahead and keep covered with a damp cloth in the refrigerator, or the cut edges dry and curl.
Eva Greene Fuller's Up-to-Date Sandwich Book (1909) belongs to a brief publishing rush of single-subject sandwich manuals aimed at hostesses rather than cooks, and its sweet section is essentially a catalogue of afternoon-tea fillings. The cream-cheese-plus-candied-fruit formula recurs in several forms in books of the period; commercial soft cheese in foil-wrapped bricks had been on sale in American groceries since the 1880s, giving hostesses a neutral, spreadable base that took any flavouring. Preserved ginger in stoneware jars was an imported luxury item, much of it shipped from Canton, and candied orange peel likewise signalled a well-stocked pantry — the sandwich is a small display of what could be bought rather than made. The maidenhair fern garnish is characteristic of the moment: ferns were a common decorative green in Edwardian table setting, and appear on serving plates in these books repeatedly.