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Log Cabin Sandwich
Boil one cupful of maple syrup, one-half cupful chopped dates, one-half cupful chopped almonds, onehalf cupful pineapple together, let cook for five minutes, take from fire, and add teaspoonful of lemon juice. Cut the bread in long thin strips and remove the crust.
Spread with the mixture. Put slices together and wrap in oiled paper; let stand a few hours, when the paper can be removed and they will keep the shape desired.
A cooked fruit-and-nut paste on thin bread, meant for the tea table rather than lunch. The hinge is the five-minute boil: it has to reduce far enough to set into a spreadable candy, or the filling soaks the bread.
- Judge the syrup by feel, not the clockThe recipe's five minutes is a rough guide, and with the fruit's own juice in the pan the mixture may not thicken far. Aim for something that will set spreadable as it cools, near what candy makers call the soft-ball stage (about 235F). If it still runs off the spoon in a thin stream, keep it on the heat; boiled much past that point it risks setting hard and tearing the bread.
- PineappleIn this period that most likely meant canned pineapple, then widely sold in slices, though fresh was available too. Chop it and drain it well before it goes in the pan, or the extra juice will lengthen the cooking time and dull the maple flavour.
- AlmondsUse blanched almonds and chop them fine. Skins left on give the filling a speckled, slightly bitter edge that fights the maple.
- DatesDried dates were sold pitted or unpitted; check for stones and for the hard stem end. Chopping them with a lightly oiled knife keeps them from balling up.
- Oiled paperParchment is the direct substitute. Plastic wrap works too, but it holds condensation against the crust, so parchment gives a drier surface.
- The resting stepStanding wrapped for a few hours is not optional decoration. The filling firms, the bread compresses slightly against it, and the strips hold a clean edge when the paper comes off. Refrigerate while they rest if the kitchen is warm.
- The breadA close-grained white sandwich loaf, cut thin, is what this expects. Day-old bread cuts into long strips more cleanly than fresh, and a serrated knife with a sawing stroke beats pressing down.
- YieldDepending how far you reduce it, the filling comes to somewhere between a cup and a half and two cups, enough for perhaps eight to ten slices of bread, or roughly sixteen to twenty finger sandwiches.
Sandwich books were a small publishing industry in the first decades of the twentieth century, driven by the afternoon tea table and the bridge party, where crustless strips and rounds were expected to look composed and travel well on a tray. The name may point at maple, or simply at the stacked strips of bread the recipe describes: Log Cabin syrup, sold in a tin shaped like a cabin, had been on American shelves since the late 1880s, and the brand's own story tied it to Lincoln's frontier childhood. The trick of wrapping filled sandwiches in oiled paper and letting them stand belongs to the same era's preoccupation with sandwiches that could be made in advance and still hold their shape hours later, before household refrigeration was general.