Home › Sweet › Veranda Sandwich
Veranda Sandwich
Chop crystallized ginger fine, moisten with a dash of orange juice; place between thin slices of lightly buttered white bread; cut in fancy shapes and garnish each with a spray of smilax.
A tea sandwich of three ingredients, which means the proportions and the cutting are the whole recipe. Notes on the two elements a modern cook will not recognize.
- The garnish is not foodSmilax here means the florist's green (Asparagus asparagoides), sold by the yard in 1900 for draping mantels and platters. It is decorative rather than edible; lift it off before eating, or substitute a small mint or lemon-balm leaf if you want something that can go in the mouth.
- Crystallized ginger, not stem ginger in syrupThe book means the sugar-rolled, semi-dry kind. Chop it to a coarse paste on the board rather than in a processor, which turns it gummy. Roughly 1/3 cup chopped ginger fills six slices of bread.
- How much orange juice"A dash" is about a teaspoon per 1/3 cup of ginger, added a few drops at a time. The aim is a spreadable mass that holds together, not a wet one; excess juice soaks the crumb and the sandwich collapses when cut.
- Butter both faces"Lightly buttered" is doing structural work. A thin film of softened butter on each inner face seals the bread against the juice, which matters if the sandwiches sit on a tray for an hour.
- Bread and cuttingUse a close-crumbed white sandwich loaf, ideally a day old, sliced thin. Cut the shapes after assembling and press gently, using a sharp cutter; trimmings are wasted either way, so plan for about a third loss.
- Resting and yieldMade in advance, cover with a barely damp cloth and refrigerate no more than two hours. Six slices of bread yield roughly 12 to 18 small fancy shapes, enough for four to six at tea.
- A useful additionSome period tea-sandwich recipes pair ginger with cream cheese. The book does not, but mashing a spoonful into the ginger makes the filling far easier to spread thinly without tearing the bread.
The name is generally taken to refer to where it was meant to be eaten: the shaded veranda of a summer house or hotel, at the afternoon tea that had become a fixed social occasion in American middle-class houses by the 1890s. Crystallized ginger arrived through the China trade, and it turns up constantly in turn-of-the-century sweet sandwiches, cakes and puddings as a genteel, faintly exotic sweetmeat. The smilax garnish dates the recipe as precisely as the ginger does: cut greenery was a standard part of the caterer's kit in that decade, ordered from the florist along with the flowers, and cookbooks of the period recommend it for platters with no thought that anyone might try to eat it. Sandwiches like this were built to be looked at as much as consumed, cut in hearts and diamonds and stacked on a doily-lined plate.