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Orange Sandwich
Between thin slices of lightly buttered white bread place thin slices of orange that have been lightly dusted with powdered sugar.
A three-ingredient sandwich that lives or dies on how you cut the orange; the original assumes skills the modern cook may not use daily.
- Cut the orange properlyEither separate the fruit into segments with the membrane cut away, or peel it deeply with a knife so no pith remains and cut across into thin rounds. Membrane left on makes the sandwich chewy and bitter.
- Drain before assemblingLay the slices on a paper towel for a few minutes. Orange juice will soak into white bread, so the sandwich is best made shortly before serving.
- Powdered sugarThe same thing sold today as confectioners' or icing sugar. A light dusting only; a sweet orange needs very little, and too much draws out juice.
- The butter is structuralA thin, even film of softened butter over the whole face of each slice acts as a moisture barrier. Skimping at the edges is where the bread goes soggy first.
- BreadA close-crumbed white sandwich loaf, sliced thin. A day-old loaf is firmer and easier to slice thin by hand than fresh bakery bread.
- FinishingTrim the crusts and cut into fingers or triangles; two full slices of bread will give four small sandwiches. The recipe specifies no quantity of orange.
Fruit sandwiches were a standard category in American sandwich books in the first decades of the twentieth century, when the afternoon tea table and the ladies' luncheon created demand for something small, sweet and quick that was not cake. Sandwich manuals of the 1900s and 1910s ran through banana, pineapple, date, fig and orange fillings in the same brisk two-line format used here. Oranges had become far more widely available by then, as Florida and California groves and refrigerated rail transport turned what had been a seasonal luxury into ordinary grocery stock, and cookbooks began treating the fruit casually. The recipe's brevity is characteristic of the genre, which spent its words on the idea rather than the method.