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Tutti Frutti Sandwiches
Cut bread in small thin squares, and spread with sweetest and freshest of butter. Chop rather fine the following ingredients for the filling: Dates, candied cherries and plums, English walnuts and blanched almonds; moisten with pineapple juice or that of an orange, and spread. English walnuts with raisins, candied cherries; moisten with very little sweet cream.
A tea sandwich rather than a lunch one, and the instructions assume you know what an afternoon tea table looked like. Two fillings are given here, not one.
- Two fillings, not a listThe recipe runs together two separate mixtures. The first is dates, candied cherries, candied plums, walnuts and almonds moistened with citrus or pineapple juice; the second is only walnuts, raisins and candied cherries bound with cream. Pick one per batch.
- The hinge is the moistureAdd the juice or cream a teaspoon at a time until the chopped fruit just clumps. Any more and it risks soaking through thin bread, which may be why this recipe specifies "very little" cream.
- Candied plumsProbably sugared whole plums or greengages of the kind confectioners sold. Candied or glace apricot is the nearest thing on a modern shelf; chopped dried apricot works but is less sweet, so taste before adding juice.
- The breadThin-sliced white sandwich bread, a day old, cuts cleanly into the small squares called for. The recipe cuts first and then butters; buttering the whole slice first is easier, and butter to the edges, since it is the barrier between filling and crumb.
- Blanched almondsBought blanched almonds are fine. Chop by hand rather than in a processor; a machine turns nuts and sticky candied fruit into paste.
- Yield and holdingA cup of filling will cover roughly a dozen and a half small squares, though the recipe gives no quantities. Assemble no more than an hour or two ahead, keep under a damp cloth in the refrigerator, and serve at cool room temperature.
Sweet sandwiches like this belong to the afternoon tea table of the turn of the twentieth century, where thin bread and small squares mattered as much as the filling. "Tutti frutti" -- Italian for "all fruits" -- was familiar in American English well before this recipe, associated above all with mixed-fruit ice cream, and by this period was attached to almost anything studded with mixed candied fruit and nuts. The combination here reflects what a well-stocked pantry could reach for: dates and candied cherries from the grocer's, English walnuts (the Persian walnut, distinguished in American usage from the native black walnut, which is stronger and darker), and pineapple juice, worth naming as a flavouring at a time when pineapple was still something of a treat.