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Wich (Mash three bananas fine add)
Mash three bananas fine, add one-half cup of chopped maraschino cherries, a tablespoonful of powdered sugar, moisten with a little thick cream, mix, and place between thin slices of lightly buttered white bread. Garnish with a cherry.
A soft sweet filling from the era when afternoon tea sandwiches were a genre of their own. It comes together in minutes, but it will not wait — the bananas darken and the bread goes damp.
- Assemble at the last minuteMashed banana browns within about fifteen minutes and weeps liquid into the crumb. Mix the filling, spread, and serve; do not make these ahead or refrigerate them overnight.
- Drain the cherries hardMaraschino cherries in modern jars sit in a heavy syrup that will thin the filling to a slurry. Chop them, then blot on paper towel before adding. Half a cup chopped is roughly 12–15 whole cherries.
- Powdered sugarRead this as confectioners' (icing) sugar, though in period usage 'powdered' could also mean a finely ground granulated sugar; either works in a moist filling like this. One tablespoon is barely sweetening — the cherries carry most of the sugar, so taste before adding more.
- "Thick cream"Heavy or double cream, unwhipped, added a teaspoon at a time. Ripe bananas are wet enough that you may need almost none; the mixture should be spreadable, not pourable.
- Butter is structuralThe thin film of butter on each slice is what keeps the bread from soaking through. Have it genuinely soft so it spreads without tearing the crumb, and cover the slice to the edges.
- Bread and cuttingA close-grained white sandwich loaf, sliced thin, suits the recipe's 'thin slices of white bread' — modern bakery white is often too open and too thick. Trim the crusts if you like, and cut into fingers or triangles after filling, with a serrated knife.
- YieldThree bananas make enough for about 6 full sandwiches, or 18–24 tea-sized pieces.
Books like this one appeared in quantity in the first decades of the twentieth century, when the sandwich stopped being simply a portable meal and became a form for the tea table, the card party and the church social. Two things made a filling like this possible: bananas, which arrived in American cities in reliable quantity once refrigerated steamship traffic from Central America was established in the late 1800s, and jarred maraschino cherries, whose original Dalmatian marasca-and-liqueur version was already being displaced in the United States by sweetened, dyed, non-alcoholic imitations. The result is a recipe that reads less like cooking than like assembly, which is exactly what its readers wanted: something pretty, cheap and quick that could be cut small and passed on a plate.