Pumpkin-flower sandwiches, an Italian snack ready for the tea table!

pumpkin flower. Wikimedia Commons.

My family, like other Italian families, enjoys a lot of old-world style recipes and habits when it comes to cooking.  One thing we like is to eat pumpkin and other squash flowers.  My great-grandmother came up with this recipe for a frugal sandwich filling that would make great tea sandwiches, I think! 

Pumpkin-flower sandwich filling (all ingredient amounts are to taste)
Bacon
Green onion
Hot banana pepper
Pumpkin blossoms or other squash flowers

Cook, drain, and chop the bacon, reserving the bacon fat in the pan.  Wash and chop the green onion and pumpkin blossoms.  Chop the banana pepper. Saute them all together, and use to fill sandwiches. 

While pumpkins are in the stores now, it may be hard to find pumpkin flowers.  I may have to wait until the spring comes around again to make these sandwiches! 

A good use for left-over biscuits and meat: Biscuit Sandwiches

modern sandwiches with biscuits and rolls. From www.BigFoto.com
If you're like me, sometimes you buy dinner at good old KFC. They always give you biscuits with your meal, even if you don't ask for them, and in my house, the biscuits always end up being left over to the next day, by which time they're dry and getting stale. The following recipe is a good idea for using them up, since you could make the sandwiches right when you brought the biscuits home, and they would be ready for a midnight snack if you didn't eat them for dinner. They would be a quick thing to grab for lunch the next day, too.

“Biscuit Sandwiches.—Split some light soft milk biscuits (or small French rolls) and butter them. Cover the lower half thickly with grated ham, or smoked tongue; pressing it down upon the butter. Then put on the upper half or lid; pressing that on, to make it stick. Pile the biscuits handsomely in a pyramid upon a flat dish, and place among them, at regular distances, green sprigs of pepper-grass, corn-salad, water-cresses, or curled parsley, allowing four or six to each biscuit. Put in the sprigs between the upper and lower halves of the biscuits, so that they may stick out at the edges. To make more space for the grated ham, you may scoop out a little of the inside of the upper-half of each milk biscuit or roll. They should be fresh, of that day’s baking. This is a nice supper-dish.”
-- from Eliza Leslie’s The Lady’s Receipt-Book, 1847

It's fun that Mrs. Leslie even gives serving and garnishing directions. Who says the Victorians always ate food that modern people wouldn't like?

The history of the "club sandwich."

ClipartETC image.
I am always interested in the history behind familiar foods. Every once in a while I like to order a Club sandwich at a restaurant, but I've never made one at home. While looking through one of my vintage recipe books (this one is a promotional booklet, published in San Francisco in the early 1900s, for the "Reliable" brand of gas ranges and stoves) I not only found instructions for making the sandwich, but some history behind it.

A popular sandwich.

A sandwich greatly in favor among gentlemen, because it is substantial and appetizing and served at restaurants of established reputation for excellence of their cuisine, as the Waldorf-Astoria of New York, is generally known as the "club sandwich." With a cup of coffee or cocoa it is almost a meal of itself. Cut slices of bread about 1/4 inch in thickness, remove the crusts and reserve one half of slices to be used, plain. Toast remaining half very delicately and butter, almost imperceptibly, so little is used. Broil very thinly cut slices of bacon. Place strips of bacon on plain bread, cover with a heart leaf of lettuce, add mayonnaise dressing, daintily sliced cold chicken, and finish with toasted slice on top. Serve on leaves of lettuce, garnished with parsley, or on doily without any garnish.

Another recipe from the same booklet is for toasting marshmallows under the broiler. That sounds good, but I have a better idea: make s'mores instead! I once tried to make s'mores for a tea party by taking mini (2 inch diameter) graham cracker pie crusts from the grocery store, and filling them with a piece of a Hershey bar with a marshmallow on top, then melting the whole thing in the toaster oven. That sort of worked, although the marshmallow got toasted before the chocolate got melted, and they were hard to eat. I'll have to try toasting the marshmallows in a pan by themselves, and partially melting the chocolate on the stovetop, and then assembling the s'more with the graham crackers, the next time I do this. It sounds messy, but maybe it will be worth it!

Yes, summer is ending, and I haven't been camping or to the beach ...