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Crabapple Jelly Sandwich
Graham bread with crabapple jelly on one piece and preserved ginger on the other.
An assembly sandwich rather than a recipe, and the whole of it rests on the contrast between tart jelly and hot-sweet ginger. A few of the components need translating.
- Graham breadNot the sweet graham cracker. Graham bread is a plain yeast loaf made with coarse unsifted whole wheat flour, closer to a modern whole-wheat sandwich loaf than to anything sweetened. Use a dense whole wheat bread and slice it thin.
- Preserved gingerPeriod recipes mean ginger root boiled in heavy syrup and sold in stone jars, sticky and translucent — sold today as stem ginger in syrup. Crystallised ginger will work but is drier and harsher; chop it fine and it will still tear the bread.
- Spread thinlyBoth fillings are essentially sugar. A scant teaspoon of each per sandwich is enough; more and the jelly weeps into the crumb within minutes.
- Crabapple jellyThe point of crabapples is acidity and high pectin, giving a firm, sharp jelly. A soft commercial apple jelly will slump and taste flat here; a tart quince or currant jelly is a better substitute than sweet apple.
- Butter firstThe original omits it, but a thin film of butter on both slices keeps the jelly from soaking through — standard practice for tea sandwiches of the period.
- Yield and servingOne slice of each spread makes a single sandwich; trim the crusts and cut into three fingers or two triangles. Figure two to three sandwiches per person at tea, and assemble no more than an hour ahead, covered with a damp cloth.
Graham bread takes its name from Sylvester Graham, the American temperance preacher and diet reformer of the 1830s who argued for coarse unsifted wheat flour against the fashionable white loaf; by 1900 the name had long outlived his movement and simply meant whole wheat. Sandwich lists in late Victorian and Edwardian household books ran to dozens of sweet as well as savoury pairings, and the object was novelty in combination rather than cookery. Crabapple jelly was a common household preserve, the fruit too sour to eat out of hand but rich enough in pectin to set without help, and preserved ginger arrived in glazed stoneware jars from China through the ports, an imported luxury that turns up regularly in turn-of-the-century American cookbooks.