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Sandwich (Chop the pineapple fine)
Chop the pineapple fine and drain. Spread lightly buttered white bread thinly with cream cheese; sprinkle with pineapple and press together, then cut the sandwiches in thin, slender strips.
A tea sandwich with no quantities given, which is normal for this book — the proportions are left to the eye. Two things decide whether it works: how dry you get the pineapple, and how thin you spread.
- The hinge: drain it properlyChopped pineapple holds far more juice than it looks. Press it in a sieve, then blot on paper towel until it stops darkening the towel, or the bread turns to paste within the hour.
- Butter is structuralThe thin film of butter on the bread is a moisture barrier, not a flavour. Have it soft enough to spread without tearing and take it right to the edges.
- Fresh pineapple vs cannedFresh pineapple contains bromelain, which will slacken the cream cheese and turn slightly bitter over a few hours. Canned pineapple is heat-treated and the enzyme is dead, so it holds better if the sandwiches are made ahead.
- Cream cheese, 1909Cream cheese -- This means a fresh unripened soft cheese he or or Neuch tub
- BreadThin-sliced white sandwich loaf, a day old rather than fresh, cuts far more cleanly. Trim the crusts before cutting into strips, not after.
- Cutting the stripsChill the assembled sandwiches under a damp cloth for 20-30 minutes, then cut with a long thin blade. Cold filling gives clean edges; warm filling squeezes out.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities. Eight slices of bread make four sandwiches, or roughly 16 finger strips, about one tea plate for four people; 4 to 6 oz of cream cheese and rather less than a cup of drained pineapple will cover it. The original says 'sprinkle', so err on the light side.
- Holding timeBest within a couple of hours. Keep covered with plastic wrap and a barely damp towel in the refrigerator; do not make them the night before.
Sandwich books proliferated in America in the first decade of the twentieth century, when the afternoon tea, the card party and the ladies' luncheon all demanded something small, sweet-savoury and eaten with the fingers; strips were one of the standard tea-sandwich shapes alongside triangles and rounds. Two industrial changes lie behind this particular combination: commercially packed cream cheese, sold in foil-wrapped blocks from about 1880 onward, and canned Hawaiian pineapple, which grew cheaper and more widely available through the first decades of the century and turned a luxury fruit into a pantry staple. The result is very much of its moment he a recipe that assumes both ingredients are things you simply have, and that the cook knows how much of each without being told.