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Cheese and Jam Sandwich
Mix cream cheese and raspberry jam to a smooth paste and spread it between the halves of split and buttered finger roll or bread.
A two-ingredient spread that lives or dies on the proportion and the temperature of the cheese. A few notes on what the words meant when this was written.
- "Cream cheese" in 1900"Cream cheese" -- the term has covered commercial block cream cheese, a fresh farmer-style curd, and, in older British usage, cream drained in a cloth, so the intended product is not certain. Modern full-fat block cream cheese or Neuch dots
- ProportionThe recipe gives none. Roughly three parts cheese to one part jam gives a spread that is clearly pink and still firm enough to cut; much more jam than that and the spread loosens and will soak into the bread.
- Bring the cheese to room temperatureThis is the hinge. Cold cheese beaten with jam breaks into lumps and will not go smooth; let it sit half an hour and it creams together in under a minute with a fork.
- Seedless jamRaspberry seeds are conspicuous in a smooth paste and unpleasant in a tea sandwich. Press ordinary jam through a sieve, or buy seedless.
- Finger rollA small soft roll roughly the length of a finger. Any soft white roll or thin-sliced sandwich bread stands in.
- The butter is not optionalThe original specifies buttering the cut faces. Butter also helps seal the crumb against moisture in the jam, and should be soft enough to spread without tearing the bread.
- Yield and servingHalf a cup of spread fills about six finger rolls or eight small crustless sandwiches. Assemble within a couple of hours of serving and keep covered with a damp cloth.
Sweet sandwiches sat alongside savoury ones on American afternoon-tea tables around 1900, and cookbooks of the period list jam, marmalade, date and nut fillings in the same chapter as ham and tongue. Factory-made cream cheese spread in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, making a soft fresh cheese something a household could buy rather than drain at home, which may help explain its use as a general-purpose sandwich base. The finger roll suggests a small, neat, hand-held sandwich rather than one set at a place.