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Neufchatel Sandwich
Finely minced ginger and candied orange peel may be sprinkled on neufchatel cheese, which has been moistened with a little butter or rich cream and spread on buttered slices of bread.
A soft-cheese tea sandwich with no measurements at all, which is typical of the sandwich chapters in turn-of-the-century American cookbooks. The proportions are yours to judge; the only thing that really matters is the texture of the cheese.
- The hinge: soften, do not meltBeat the Neufchatel with butter or cream at room temperature until it spreads without tearing the bread. Warming it on the stove will make it grainy and it will weep into the crumb.
- What Neufchatel meant hereAmerican Neufchatel, made commercially from the later nineteenth century, is a fresh soft cheese made with milk rather than the cream used for cream cheese, so it is slightly leaner and tangier. Supermarket "1/3 less fat cream cheese" is often sold under the Neufchatel name and is the nearest modern equivalent; French AOP Neufchatel is a bloomy-rind cheese and behaves quite differently.
- Candied orange peelCommercial candied peel is often dry and bitter-edged. Mince it fine, or use the softer strips sold for baking, so the pieces do not drag the cheese off the bread.
- Which ginger"Finely minced" points to crystallised or preserved stem ginger rather than the ground spice. Preserved ginger in syrup should be blotted dry before mincing or the sandwich will be sticky.
- BreadA fine-grained white sandwich loaf, cut thin, suits this best. Butter the slices to the edge before spreading the cheese; the butter layer helps keep moisture out of the bread.
- Yield and servingRoughly 4 oz of cheese with 1 tbsp butter or cream fills about eight thin slices, or sixteen small tea sandwiches once crusts are trimmed and the slices quartered. Assemble within a couple of hours and keep covered with a damp cloth so the edges do not dry.
Sandwich chapters expanded sharply in American cookbooks around 1900, a shift often attributed to the afternoon tea, the card party and the newly fashionable picnic hamper, and they leaned heavily on soft cheeses because they spread cleanly and needed no cooking. Neufchatel had become a familiar factory product in the United States by then, made in New York State dairies on a French model and sold alongside the cream cheese that would soon overshadow it. Pairing it with candied peel and crystallised ginger reflects a period taste for sweet-savoury "fancy" sandwiches, where the confectioner's shelf supplied the seasoning: preserved fruits and ginger seem to have been kept readily enough for cakes and puddings, and the sandwich course borrowed them freely.