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Wich (Whip a gill of cream add to it)
Whip a gill of cream, add to it sufficient grated cheese, American or Parmesan, to make a stiff paste; spread lightly buttered white bread with this and sprinkle thickly with very finely minced celery. Cover with another slice of buttered bread.
A whipped-cream cheese spread, closer to a mousse than to a sandwich filling, and it depends entirely on getting the paste stiff enough to hold up between two slices of bread.
- A gillHalf a cup, or 4 fluid ounces. Whipped, it roughly doubles to about a cup of soft peaks; with the cheese added, that makes enough filling for a small plate of sandwiches, though the recipe states no yield.
- American cheeseIn an American cookbook of this period this means ordinary domestic cheddar, usually a mild factory cheese, not the processed slices sold under the name today. Use a mild to medium cheddar grated fine on a rasp, or the Parmesan as offered.
- How much cheese"Sufficient" is genuinely open. Start with about 1 cup of finely grated cheese to a gill of whipped cream and add more until the mixture holds its shape on the spoon; Parmesan is drier and stiffens faster than cheddar.
- Fold, don't beatWhip the cream first, then fold the cheese in. Grating cheese into unwhipped cream and beating the two together gives a grainy, loose mixture that soaks the bread.
- The celeryMince it as finely as the original insists, and blot the pieces dry. Coarse or wet celery weeps into the cream and pushes the top slice off.
- Butter is structuralThe thin butter layer on both slices helps seal the crumb against the moisture in the cream as much as it adds flavour. Without it the bread dampens quickly.
- Timing and servingAssemble shortly before serving and keep covered and cold; whipped cream slackens as it warms, so these do not travel well. Trimming the crusts and cutting small is a common treatment for sandwiches of this kind, though the recipe does not call for it.
Sandwich books were a small publishing genre often associated with the afternoon tea, the card party and the ladies' luncheon rather than with lunch boxes, and this filling has the character of that world: pale, soft, mildly flavoured, and cut small. Whipped cream turns up constantly in such collections as a lightener, folded into cheese, nuts, or minced ham to make a spread that could be eaten in one or two bites without a knife. The choice offered between "American or Parmesan" is telling about the period's cheese counter, where imported Parmesan was the standard hard grating cheese and "American" simply meant the domestic cheddar-type wheels made in the factory dairies of New York, Wisconsin and Ohio. Celery was then a comparatively expensive winter vegetable, often served on its own in a tall glass.