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Graham Bread Sandwiches
Rub one cream cheese to a paste, add six olives finely chopped and one-half cup finely chopped pecans. Spread thin slices of graham bread with chive butter. Spread an equal number slices of bread with cheese mixture. Lay one of each together, press edges, trim off crusts and cut diagonally across in triangles.
A tea-table sandwich from the era when "one cream cheese" meant one small foil-wrapped package rather than a weight. Nothing here is difficult; the details are all in the proportions and the cutting.
- "One cream cheese"In American books of this period this means a single retail package of fresh cream cheese, usually 3 ounces. Use 3 to 4 oz, softened at room temperature so it can be rubbed smooth without thinning it with liquid.
- Chive butterThe book assumes you know it: butter creamed soft and beaten with finely minced chives, roughly a tablespoon of chives to a quarter cup of butter, with a little salt. It must be spreadable but not melted, or it soaks the bread.
- Graham breadGraham flour is coarsely ground whole wheat including the bran and germ. A dense whole-wheat sandwich loaf is the closest supermarket equivalent; avoid anything with a very open crumb, which tears when you spread it.
- The olivesThe recipe says only "olives"; green olives in brine are the likeliest reading for a book of this kind, though ripe olives were also in use. Chop them fine and blot them dry before they go into the cheese, or the filling weeps.
- PecansHalf a cup finely chopped is a lot against 3 oz of cheese, and it is meant to be. Toast them lightly and cool completely first; warm nuts loosen the cheese.
- Slice thickness"Thin slices" is not defined; something around 1/4 inch or less is the usual reading for a tea sandwich. A day-old loaf, well chilled, slices thin far more cleanly than a fresh one.
- Chill before cuttingAssemble the sandwiches whole, wrap and refrigerate 30 minutes, then trim the crusts and cut. The firm filling holds the triangles square instead of squeezing out at the edges.
- YieldNo yield is given. The filling would cover roughly 8 sandwiches, giving 16 triangles if halved diagonally as the recipe directs, or 32 if quartered.
Graham bread takes its name from Sylvester Graham, the Presbyterian preacher and dietary reformer of the 1830s who campaigned for unsifted whole-meal flour against the fashionable white loaf; by the time this book appeared, "graham" had long since detached from his moral programme and simply meant coarse whole wheat on a bakery label. The sandwich itself belongs to a different fashion altogether: the crustless, filled, geometrically cut tea sandwich that is generally said to have spread through American middle-class entertaining around the turn of the twentieth century, helped along by the arrival of cheap packaged cream cheese, which gave hostesses a bland, stiff base that would carry chopped olives, nuts, pimiento or dates.