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Maple Sugar Sandwich
On thin slices of lightly buttered white bread spread maple sugar, put slices together and cut with a maple leaf cutter. Serve with hot coffee.
A two-ingredient sandwich that lives or dies on the state of the sugar and the thinness of the bread.
- What maple sugar meant hereMaple sugar of the period was commonly sold as pressed cakes or bricks, which can be shaved or grated fine; stirred and granulated forms were also sold. Modern hard maple candy or granulated maple sugar behaves differently: grate the cake fine, or use granulated maple sugar and press it firmly into the butter so it holds. Maple syrup is a poor substitute here, as it tends to soak into the crumb.
- The butter is structuralThe thin film of butter is what keeps the sugar in place and stops the bread going damp. Have it genuinely soft so it spreads on thin slices without tearing them, and keep the layer light, as the original says.
- Bread and slicingA close-crumbed white sandwich loaf, a day old, cuts thinner and cleaner than fresh. The book does not define 'thin'; around 1/4 inch is a workable reading.
- The maple leaf cutterA cookie cutter, used purely for looks and typical of the fancy tea sandwich of the period. It wastes a good deal of each slice; cut the sandwich into fingers or triangles instead if that bothers you, and save the trimmings for crumbs.
- Assemble lateSugar is hygroscopic and will draw moisture from the butter and bread. Assemble and cut these close to serving time, or the sugar dissolves into a smear.
- YieldOne standard loaf gives about 20 slices, so 10 sandwiches; with a leaf cutter expect 10 shaped pieces, enough for five or six people at tea.
The Up-to-Date Sandwich Book belongs to a wave of early twentieth-century American cookery books built entirely around the sandwich, then still a novel enough form to justify a volume of its own, and its sweet section reads as fare for occasions of the daintier sort. Maple sugar was an obvious sweet filling for a North American household: sugaring off in late winter produced a good deal of sugar cake, and the solid form kept without spoiling and travelled well. The technique of boiling maple sap down is generally traced to Indigenous peoples of the northeastern woodlands, from whom colonists learned it, and pressed maple cakes were a familiar article of commerce by 1900. The maple leaf cutter is pure period styling, of a piece with the era's taste for shaped, crustless, deliberately dainty sandwiches.