mme_hardy | Sandwiches Have Gone Modern

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Sandwiches Have Gone Modern

From Woman's World, August, 1936 p. 24, but this time not nasty.

To begin at the beginning, here are two quick sandwich breads -Chocolate Bread which you will find perfectly grand for cream cheese or marmalade sandwiches, and Date-Nut-Orange Bread.

Chocolate Bread
3 cups sifted cake flour
3 teaspoons baking powder
1 3/4 teaspoons salt
1 egg
1/4 cup melted butter or shortening
1 1/4 cups milk
2 squares (ounces) unsweetened chocolate, melted

Sift together flour, baking powder and salt. Add sugar and when thoroughly blended moisten with the beaten egg. shortening and milk,. adding these gradually and mixing well. Finally add the chocolate and when well blended turn into a greased loaf-pan and bake in a moderate oven-350 degrees F.--about one and a quarter hours.

Date-Nut-Orange Bread

2 cups white flour
1 teaspoon soda [baking soda, I assume, not washing]
1 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons baking powder
2 cups graham flour
3/4 cup sugar
2/3 cup chopped nut-meats
2/3 cup pitted dates, cut small
Grated rind 1 orange
2 cups sour milk
1/2 cup molasses

Sift together the white hour. soda, salt and baking powder. Add the graham flour, sugar, nut-meats,
dates and orange rind and moisten with the blended sour milk and molasses. Turn into one large well greased bread pan and bake in a moderate oven-350 degrees F.-about one and a quarter hours.

...
Another variety of the rolled sandwich is the one where buttered fresh bread is rolled around a spray of watercress. a short stalk of celery (plain or stuffed) or a tip of cooked asparagus, any of these being first dipped into French dressing for greater flavor.
[I've seen recipes where the asparagus was dipped in hollandaise. Mm.]

...
Afternoon Tea Sandwiches

Cucumber: White bread with filling of finely minced well drained cucumber seasoned with onion juice, lemon juice and minced parsley.

Rolled Mint: Cream butter for sandwiches then work into it very finely minced mint-1 teaspoon to 2/3 cup butter.

Peach Cream: Spread white, graham or whole wheat bread first with softened butter then with cream cheese., next with peach (or apricot) marmalade. Nuts if you like but they are good enough without. Serve either as open or closed sandwiches.

Tropical: Use white bread, spread with creamed butter then with currant jelly into which shredded coconut, plain or toasted, has been beaten with a fork. Top with thinly sliced bananas sprinkled with lemon juice. Serve either open or closed.

Date Nut: Thin slices of pound cake or sponge cake with filling of chopped dates and nuts (in equal proportions) moistened with orange juice.

Campfire Sandwiches

Split, toast and butter round sandwich rolls. Fill with piping hot slices of sautéed canned corned beef hash, top with a little prepared horseradish, mustard or mustard pickle. Serve dill pickles on the side.

Roquefort-Ham for the Slag Party*

Combine finely minced ham with one-fourth its bulk each of mashed roquefort cheese and chopped sweet pickles. Moisten with French dressing or mayonnaise. Use buttered whole wheat or rye bread or pumpernickel, topping the filling, if desired, with thinly sliced, well chilled, seasoned fresh tomatoes.

Century Club

Use three slices buttered toast for each sandwich. Arrange on the first, lettuce, crisp bacon and sliced tomato moistened with French dressing or mayonnaise. Cover with second slice of toast, placing on this lettuce, cold tongue and minced mustard pickle. Top with remaining toast slice, cut through to form two triangles and garnish with pickle fans.

* okay, it's really Stag Party, but I prefer the OCR version.

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I have a cookbook that has a nice recipe for a chocolate yeast bread with vanilla butter to go with it.

Which one? I like yeast breads much more than tea breads.

It's one of Jane and Michael Stern's books about "roadfood" in the United States. IIRC it's a fairly ordinary white bread dough with some of the flour replaced by cocoa and some sugar; the butter is creamed with vanilla sugar.

Thorough Bread's chocolate bread recipe is apparently this or nearly so. The boules they were selling last time I had one were really too small, they were more like softball-sized large buns and impossible to slice. Made into a sliceable loaf, the bread toasted well and kept well, and it was interesting with various cheeses and the like.

The rye makes this worth eating, unlike a cake-like chocolate bread.

Edited (HTML fix) 2017-06-16 02:15 (UTC)

Thank you!

e: I keep managing to start a starter, but even so I think making a separate levain from the starter, then making the levain into bread, is more effort than I have in me.

Edited 2017-06-16 02:53 (UTC)

I can't be bothered with starters, they're the tribbles of baking.

I'd fake around that with a quick-and-dirty sponge kind of thing. I'm sure I've seen something about bypassing starters for people who do not do starters.

My father used to make this! He got the recipe from a magazine in the early 1980s. (I'm sure it was Bon Appetit or Gourmet, but I have no idea which.) The article had chocolate and vanilla yeast breads, but only the chocolate made it into the regular Sunday morning rotation. It wasn't very sweet, but it smelled wonderful. It also made great toast, and amazing peanut butter sandwiches.

Some of those recipes remind me of my mother's go-to recipe for when she couldn't get out of having to make fancy sandwiches for some occasion or other: cream cheese mixed with chopped dates, on raisin bread with the crusts cut off, cut into quarters. They were actually pretty good, and looked like they were more trouble to make than they actually were.

That's the key trick, I think. I do love cucumber sandwiches. I should treat myself sometime.

Either Fannie Farmer or James Beard or someone of that kidney suggests cutting your tea sandwiches round with a cutter, buttering the cut sides with sweet butter, and rolling in finely chopped parsley/herbs.

Mmmmm.

those quick bread recipes look fairly reasonable, although I fear the texture would be far too close with all the mixing in the recipe. I'm always worried I will overwork my quick breads.

My go-to for a "sophisticated" appetizer when I was a teenager was shredded cheddar mixed with diced onion and mayo, spread on Pepperidge Farm white bread, with the crusts cut off, and then broiled. It's quite tasty, although very 1970s.

You know what I miss that you cannot get here? Those superthin bread slices Pepperidge Farm used to sell -- maybe still does -- that were fantastic for toasting. And for canapés.

Probably a transatlantic language thing, but why are they called "breads"? They sound like perfectly ordinary cakes, the sort of thing we have at teatime or mid morning

Good question. Date-nut bread is bread, but pound cake is cake, and you make them in the same sort of pan. Hmmm. In general, though, if you say "cake" to an American, we expect a round thing with multiple layers.

Definitely the Pond factor. I make cakes in round tins, square tins (with removable bases to make the cake easier to turn out) and rectangular tins when the cake is to be cut in squares like fruit gingerbread or peanut brownie. Most cakes are single layer, though Victoria sponge can be done as a "sandwich", two layers, with a filling of jam or butter icing. Not so convenient for eating on the go.

Icing on top would be hard - Royal icing, made with egg white, takes a day or two to set (so is usually kept for Christmas and wedding cakes) while ordinary hot water icing can if you're not careful, set before you finish icing.

Date and walnut loaf is quite different from any kind of cake and when I've made it always uses yeast

Over here, there's a class called "tea breads" or "quick breads" that are moist, baking-powder raised, and cooked in a loaf pan. I think the loaf pan is why they're called breads. Note that pound cake is also made in a loaf pan, but is definitely a cake. Language is weird.

Also, our ordinary frosting is buttercream, which is extremely easy and never sets up.

Edited 2017-06-16 15:10 (UTC)

In either of the countries I've lived in, if it's baking-powder raised, it's cake.

Buttercream sounds like it might be what we call butter icing. It wouldn't normally go on top of a cake because it would be messy to eat (too easy to get sticky fingers).

That's another difference, then--cakes here are eaten with a fork! If it's finger food, it's either a bar cookie or a quick bread, depending on what sort of pan it's cooked in and how heavily it's leavened.

This. "Cakes" are usually either iced or frosted, the exceptions I can think of being angel food and pound cake.

Are drizzle cakes a thing your side of the Atlantic? Sponge baked in a loaf tin, flavoured with citrus zest, then citrus syrup poured over while it is warm (but not hot) from the oven and left to soak in. Usually lemon, and with reason, but I've seen orange and even grapefruit.

Not really? They look wonderful on GBBO.

For my birthday cake this year, I had a lemon drizzle made in a round tin, then split and sandwiched with lemon curd and creme fraiche. Mmmmm. (though it was at that stage more a gateau than a cake)

That sounds fantastic.

One definitely could not ice seed cake or Madeira cake, or ginger cake, and the nearest I've seen on brownies is a thin sprinkling of icing sugar.

Pound cakes as such dropped out of the collective psyche during rationing, but rich fruit cakes are still around, not iced for everyday use but for Christmas and wedding use covered with Royal icing. A fairly fiddly process: to keep the icing from getting all crumby and not adhering properly, first something like apricot jam is applied to the cake, then a more or less thin layer of marzipan is laid on that (the jam sticks it to the cake), then the icing is applied to the marzipan. The slow setting time of the icing means that elaborate decorations can be made with it.

I am very sad about pound cakes; I love them. I can certainly see that they'd be appalling wastes of luxury items during rationing. Ours, of course, lasted only during the war itself, which we entered later.

Not so much a waste, more non-availability. I still don't care for carrot cake, having had too many cakes partly sweettedpned with grated carrot.

Just checked pound cake recipe, and it sounds like the sort of thing I would put butter on as not much taste to it..

Come to think of it, it sounds rather like the cake part of cherry cake.

I loathe carrot cake, which over here usually has half an inch or more of sweetsweetsweet cream cheese icing o the top.

Pound cake actually has a lot of flavor; it tastes like vanilla and butter and richness. People often put fruit on it to cut the richness or as a contrast.

Cream cheese icing? Even thinking about it makes me feel queasy.

Your description of pound cake sounds very different from the recipes I found ( they don't mention vanilla) and sounds very ordinary (eg as the matrix for cherry cake - glacé cherries with the syrup washed off)

Sounds like your cakes are more like what we would call gateaux, which are only really eaten as dessert and made their arrival in the early 1970s (Black Forest Gateau just about epitomises the decade).

Afternoon tea wouldn't be afternoon tea without a wedge-shaped slice of cake, and everything at that meal is finger food.

Also good for when you've been exerting a lot of energy. When the family went sailing on the Norfolk Broads I used to take our favourites; a slice of fruit cake would go down well, but whoever was on the helm wouldn't have thanked me for anything less substantial! And I wouldn't have had time beforehand to fiddle around with anything needing yeast.

It is a standard joke here that nobody eats fruitcake, that they are simply regifted from house to house. The default American commercial fruitcake is a bunch of candied fruits and nuts very, very thinly held together with batter.

I remember GBBO making "American pie" and "American cake" and not quite getting it, although admittedly that's GBBO for you.

Rich fruit cake should be so rich with sultanas, currants and raisins that you can scarcely see the crumbs in between! Sugar used should be the darkest available; Muscovado is good because it adds to the depth of taste without making it too sweet; the cake itself should be as dark as possible.

If it has to keep for any significant time, turn it over after turning it out, prick the bottom and sprinkle on some dark rum or brandy once a day.

Aha! Fruitcake here is mostly candied fruits and nuts, with some but not lots of raisins.

I'd use candied fruit in Christmas pudding but not cake (ingredients are very similar except that the pudding has suet where the cake has butter) but not nuts in either. Very rich indeed. People have been known to quail on Christmas Day a the thought of Christmas pudding after Christmas dinner being followed by Christmas cake at teatime.

Wow. Over here, there are American pancakes (not like yours, they're fluffy); biscuits -- again, not yours, but a distant cousin of scones; muffins -- still not yours; and of course zucchini bread, banana bread, and on and on. And banana bread, at least, is considered bread enough to sometimes be made into sweet sandwiches.

Bara brith; bread or cake? (I'd argue bread because you can put butter on it, but to all intents and purposes it's cake).

Edited 2017-06-16 09:09 (UTC)

But here it's a different culture and a different language. Bara ceirch is oatcake, so I wouldn't expect a one-to-one mapping between "bara" and "bread".

Further thought: "cacen" is a loan word, so it wouldn't surprise me if items described as "bara" included some cakes.

Oh, thank you - this is incredibly useful ( for future fic-writing) *and* tasty

Slag Party is an excellent name for a gossip fest.

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