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Sandwich (Between thin slices)
Between thin slices of buttered brown bread from which the crusts have been removed, place slices of banana, press together and place in the oven and leave until bread is toasted. Serve hot. Very good for invalids.
A two-ingredient hot sandwich with no temperature, time or yield given. The points below fill in what the original assumes you already know.
- What "brown bread" means hereIn American books of this period the term covers both whole-wheat or graham bread and the steamed molasses loaf known as Boston brown bread. Either works, but they give very different results: whole wheat toasts crisp and dry, while the steamed loaf is dense and sweet and will scorch before it crisps. Sliced whole-wheat sandwich bread is the safer reading.
- Oven heatNone is specified; the recipe says only to leave the sandwich in until the bread is toasted. A hot oven, in the region of 400-425F for roughly 6-10 minutes, will brown the outside before the banana softens too far; a slower oven tends to dry the bread without colouring it.
- Butter both facesThe recipe specifies only buttered bread, which reads as butter on the facing surfaces. If you also butter the outsides, the sandwich behaves more like a griddled one than a piece of dry toast; this is an addition to the original rather than something it calls for.
- Banana ripenessUse fruit that is fully yellow but still firm. Overripe bananas collapse into liquid under heat and soak through the crumb; underripe ones stay starchy and chalky even after baking.
- Press and weight"Press together" matters more than it sounds. Slices of banana are round and slippery; a plate or a second baking sheet set on top for the first few minutes keeps the sandwich closed and the fruit from sliding out.
- CrustsRemoving the crusts is a service convention of the era, not a technical requirement. Trim them if you want the tidy tea-table look; leaving them on gives a sturdier sandwich.
- Yield and timingFigure one sandwich per person as a light course or two as a small meal. These do not hold: the bread softens from beneath within a few minutes, so bake them just before serving.
Eva Greene Fuller's collection dates from the years when the sandwich moved out of the lunch pail and onto the tea table, and it is often said to include a run of fruit and nut fillings meant for afternoon entertaining rather than for work. The closing line, "very good for invalids," places this one in a second tradition entirely: invalid cookery, a distinct genre of the period in which nourishing, bland, easily chewed food was prepared for the sickroom. Bananas were promoted hard as a wholesome, digestible food for children and the ill. Toasting the bread served the same purpose - toast was generally held to be gentler on a weak stomach than fresh bread, an idea that turns up throughout nineteenth-century domestic manuals.