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No. 2 (Chop candied cherries fine)
Chop candied cherries fine, moisten with orange juice, place between thin slices of lightly buttered white bread. Garnish top with a cherry.
A two-ingredient filling that depends entirely on the quality of the cherries and on restraint with the juice. The original gives no quantities, so work by eye.
- Candied cherriesThese are glacé cherries — whole cherries cooked in heavy syrup and dried, sold near the candied peel for holiday baking. They are not the same as maraschino cherries, which are brined, bleached and dyed, and which carry far too much liquid for a sandwich filling.
- How much juice"Moisten" means a teaspoon or so of orange juice per quarter cup of chopped fruit, worked in until the mixture just holds together. Any more and the syrup-heavy cherries turn to a slurry that soaks straight through the crumb.
- Quantities to work fromAbout 1/3 cup of chopped candied cherries will fill four small sandwiches; scale up from there.
- The breadA close-grained white sandwich loaf, sliced thin and buttered right to the edges; butter in a sandwich acts as a moisture barrier as much as a flavour, which matters even under a sweet filling. Softened, not melted.
- Trimming and cuttingTea sandwiches were commonly crusted off and cut into fingers, triangles or rounds after filling rather than before. Assemble whole, then trim with a long thin knife.
- The garnishA half cherry pressed onto the top slice will slide off unless it has something to sit in; a dab of butter or a little of the filling anchors it.
- Holding themBest eaten within a couple of hours. Cover with a barely damp cloth over waxed paper or plastic wrap — the cloth must not touch the bread — and keep cool rather than refrigerated cold, which stales the crumb.
Sweet sandwiches occupy a substantial part of Eva Greene Fuller's The Up-to-Date Sandwich Book (1909), and they belong to the afternoon tea and card-party table rather than to lunch. The candied cherry was a natural fit for that kind of cooking: glacé fruit kept well in the pantry, needed no preparation beyond chopping, and gave colour at a time when a tea plate was judged largely on how it looked. Recipes of this sort are written as formulas rather than measured procedures because the cook was expected to fill a plate, not a pan — Fuller's book runs to hundreds of such one-sentence entries, each essentially a combination to be scaled to the number of guests.