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Gooseberry Jam Sandwich
Spread thinly cut slices of lightly buttered white bread with gooseberry jam; place slices together and cut in slender strips. Garnish with a spray of smilax. Serve as soon as made.
A three-line tea sandwich that depends entirely on how thin the bread is cut and how soon it reaches the table. A few notes on the details the original assumes you know.
- Cut the bread thin, and cut it cold"thinly cut" is not defined in the book, but something close to an eighth of an inch is the usual reading, and it is far easier to achieve from a chilled, day-old loaf with a long serrated knife than from fresh bread. A close-grained white sandwich loaf rather than an open artisan crumb suits the instruction better.
- Butter is structuralButter does structural work -- the thin film helps seal the crumb against the jam as well as adding flavour. It should be genuinely soft, at cool room temperature, or it will tear the slices; whipping it briefly with a fork makes it spread without pressure.
- Smilax is not foodSmilax was the standard florist's trailing greenery of the period, laid on platters for decoration and lifted off before eating. Any modern nonedible garnish should be treated the same way, or substitute something you would actually eat.
- Why "as soon as made"Gooseberry jam is wet and acidic and will soak into very thin bread quickly, which is presumably why the book insists on serving at once. If you must hold them, assemble as little ahead as you can and cover with a barely damp cloth.
- Crusts and the stripsThe book says nothing about trimming; if you do trim, cut the crusts off the closed sandwich and then cut across into narrow fingers. How many strips you get depends on how narrow you cut them.
- The jam itselfGooseberries are high in pectin and sharply acidic, and jam was often made from firm, barely ripe fruit, giving a stiff set. A modern soft-set jam will run; a firmer preserve holds the line better.
Sandwich books like this one belong to the era when afternoon tea and the ladies' luncheon had become fixed social occasions in American middle-class households, and hostesses wanted variety by the dozen rather than depth. The sweet section is essentially a catalogue of jams, jellies, marmalades and nut pastes applied to buttered bread, with the interest carried by the fruit and the cut rather than by technique. Gooseberries were commoner in kitchen gardens then than now; American cultivation was later curtailed in many states because Ribes bushes host white pine blister rust, which is part of why the fruit largely disappeared from the domestic table. The smilax garnish helps date the page: trailing greens sold by florists for draping platters and mantelpieces were a standard part of formal table setting around the turn of the twentieth century.