Home › Sweet › Oriental Sandwich (Mash four bananas add one-half)
Oriental Sandwich (Mash four bananas add one-half)
Mash four bananas; add one-half cup of maraschino cherries, two tablespoonfuls of honey, and two tablespoonfuls of sweet thick cream. Mix and spread on thin slices of lightly buttered white bread, cover with another slice, and garnish top with a cherry.
A soft fruit spread on buttered bread, from the era when the sandwich was a tea-table item rather than lunch. It is assembled in minutes and does not keep, so treat the timing as the main constraint.
- Make it to orderMashed banana browns within about fifteen minutes and weeps liquid soon after. Mix the filling immediately before spreading, or the sandwiches go grey and soggy on the plate.
- The cherriesMaraschino cherries of this period were more likely to be liqueur-preserved fruit than the bright red dyed cherries sold now, though cheaper imitations were already on the American market. Drain modern ones well and blot them dry, or the filling will run; chopping them is implied but not stated.
- Sweet thick creamThis means unsoured cream, not whipped; modern heavy or double cream is the nearest equivalent. Two tablespoons is enough to loosen the mash without making it pourable.
- Butter is structuralA thin layer of butter helps keep the bread from absorbing juice. The recipe specifies only 'lightly buttered' bread and does not say whether the covering slice is buttered too. Have it soft enough to spread without tearing.
- The breadThin-sliced plain white bread is what the recipe calls for; it says nothing about trimming crusts. A tight-crumbed pullman loaf holds up far better than an open artisan crumb.
- YieldFour bananas, half a cup of cherries, honey and cream make upwards of two cups of filling.
- Adjusting sweetnessBetween the honey and the cherries this is very sweet. A pinch of salt or a squeeze of lemon in the mash cuts it and also slows the browning.
Sandwich books proliferated in the United States around the turn of the twentieth century, when afternoon tea, card parties and church suppers created demand for small, sweet, handheld food that could be made ahead by one person. Bananas were the novelty ingredient of that moment: regular steamship shipments from Central America u2014 running in the 1890s chiefly on fast ventilated ships, with refrigerated fleets largely a development of the early 1900s u2014 had made them cheap and common in American cities, and cookbooks of the period treat them as an exotic that had suddenly become ordinary. "Oriental" here carries no connection to any actual Asian cooking; it seems to have served as a catch-all label that Victorian and Edwardian writers attached to anything fruity, perfumed or vaguely luxurious, much as "Turkish" or "Persian" were used for confectionery. The maraschino cherry, then still associated with the Dalmatian marasca cherries preserved in liqueur, supplied the same suggestion of imported glamour.