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Oriental Sandwich (Mix one cake of cream cheese)
Mix one cake of cream cheese with a little maple syrup, then add sliced maraschino cherries. Place between thin slices of lightly buttered bread. Garnish with a spray of smilax and a cherry.
A tea sandwich from the era when a sandwich book could run to two hundred pages of cream cheese variations. The proportions are left entirely to the cook, so taste as you go.
- A cake of cream cheeseCream cheese of this period was commonly sold as a small foil-wrapped cake of about 3 ounces. Modern 8-ounce blocks are nearly three times the size; use roughly a third of one, or scale the cherries and syrup up accordingly.
- How much syrupNone is specified. Start with a teaspoon of real maple syrup per 3 ounces of cheese and stop before the mixture loosens — too much and it will soak the bread rather than sit on it. Bring the cheese to room temperature first so it takes the syrup without beating.
- Maraschino cherriesThe name originally meant marasca cherries preserved in maraschino liqueur, though by the early 1900s American versions were often domestic cherries flavoured and preserved to imitate them. Today's are brined, bleached and dyed sweet cherries in corn syrup, considerably sweeter and softer. Drain and blot them well, or the filling will weep pink.
- Smilax is a garnish, not foodSmilax was the florist's trailing green of the period, sold by the yard for table decoration. It belongs on the platter, not in the sandwich, and should be removed before anyone eats.
- The breadThin means thin: a day-old close-crumbed white loaf sliced about 1/4 inch, crusts off, buttered right to the edges. The butter is structural here — it seals the crumb against the moisture in the cheese.
- Yield and holdingOne 3-ounce cake fills about six thin slices, giving twelve small triangles or fingers. Assemble no more than an hour or two ahead and keep them covered with a damp cloth in the refrigerator; the filling firms up as it chills.
"Oriental" in an American sandwich book of this vintage rarely signals anything geographic — it was a fashionable adjective attached to anything glossy, sweet or faintly exotic, and here it seems to rest entirely on the maraschino cherry. The volume belongs to the brief publishing boom in sandwich manuals that followed the rise of the afternoon tea, the card party and the boxed luncheon in the first years of the twentieth century, when packaged cream cheese gave hostesses a neutral, spreadable base for dozens of near-identical variations. Sweet cheese sandwiches of this kind appear, on the evidence of the books themselves, to have sat on the tea table alongside the savoury ones rather than at dessert, and the smilax garnish is a reminder that these books treated the appearance of the plate as part of the recipe.