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Pineapple Sandwich
One cup of pineapple cut fine, two tablespoonfuls of lemon juice, and one cupful of sugar. Cook until thick, and when cold spread upon lady fingers and press together. White bread may be used.
This is a small-batch pineapple jam used as a sandwich filling rather than a preserve. The only real technique is knowing when to stop cooking it.
- The hinge: cook to a jam, not a syrupWith equal volumes of fruit and sugar plus lemon juice, the mixture needs 10-20 minutes at a steady simmer, stirring often near the end so the sugar does not scorch. It is done when a spoon drawn through the pan leaves a track that closes slowly; it will thicken further as it cools.
- Fresh or canned pineappleThe recipe says only "pineapple cut fine" and does not specify which; fresh fruit chopped small is the likeliest reading, though canned pineapple was already widely sold by 1909. Either works here. If using canned, drain it well or the filling takes noticeably longer to reduce.
- Bromelain is not an issue once cookedRaw pineapple's enzyme prevents gelatin from setting and can make dairy taste bitter, but cooking destroys it. Cooked pineapple fillings were common in this period, though raw ones also appear.
- Sugar quantityOne cup of sugar to one cup of fruit is very sweet by current taste. Two-thirds of a cup still sets and thickens properly and lets the fruit through; the lemon juice is doing real work against the sweetness, so keep it.
- Lady fingersThe crisp, dry Italian-style savoiardi are what this wants -- the soft sponge kind fall apart under a wet filling. Spread thinly and assemble shortly before serving so they stay crisp.
- If using white breadTrim the crusts, spread thin, and cut into fingers or triangles. A very thin film of softened butter on the bread first keeps the filling from soaking through.
- Yield and keepingThe recipe makes roughly a cup of filling, enough for a dozen or so small sandwiches. Kept covered in the refrigerator it should hold for about a week; it is not processed for shelf storage.
Eva Greene Fuller's The Up-to-Date Sandwich Book (1909) belongs to a brief, distinctly American moment when the sandwich was reinvented as a genteel item for teas, card parties and luncheons rather than a workman's lunch -- hence a whole chapter of sweet fillings, and hence lady fingers standing in for bread. Pineapple was a fashionable choice for such menus: commercial canning in Hawaii had expanded rapidly in the first decade of the century, and a fruit that had been a costly novelty in the 1870s was by 1909 an ordinary grocery item that still carried a whiff of luxury. Cooking the fruit down with sugar and lemon was one way of handling it, and a thick filling would have held up better in a tea sandwich cut into fingers and stacked on a plate.