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A Variety of Sandwiches
Mix three tablespoonfuls of condensed milk, with half a cup of confectioners' sugar, and two tablespoonfuls of mixed nuts, put through the food chopper. Flavor with 20 drops of essence of peppermint, or a teaspoonful of vanilla. Spread between flaxseed, oatmeal, or whole wheat crackers.
Chop celery and raw apple together, mix with cream cheese and spread between thin slices of graham bread.
Spread whole wheat bread with almond butter and cover with sliced black figs.
Mince raw carrots and beets together, mix with ground nuts. Spread thin slices of graham bread with butter, put in the filling and cut in fancy shapes.
Mix chopped raisins with honey marmalade and spread on buttered brown bread.
Cut thin slices of whole wheat bread, spread with vegex and cover with chopped nuts, raisins, figs or prunes.
Crush slices of ripe tomatoes, mix with chopped spinach, moisten with mayonnaise and spread between slices of whole wheat, or graham bread.
Spread whole wheat fruit crackers with cream cheese, or butter, and sprinkle with chopped nuts.
Cut whole wheat bread into fancy shapes, spread thickly with butter and cover with honey orange marmalade.
Between slices of buttered whole wheat bread, put ground nuts moistened with raisin syrup.
Nine fillings run together in a single block, most of them uncooked and assembled in minutes. A few of the ingredients have changed names or left the shelf entirely.
- Condensed milkThis means sweetened condensed milk, not evaporated. With half a cup of confectioners' sugar on top of it, the nut filling is very sweet; cut the sugar sharply if you want it spreadable rather than candy-like.
- Essence of peppermintTwenty drops is roughly a quarter teaspoon. Peppermint oil is far more concentrated than an alcohol-based essence or extract; if you are using oil rather than extract, start with two or three drops and taste.
- Food chopperThe hand-cranked chopper clamped to a table edge produced a coarse, dry mince. A food processor pulsed a few times gets closer than a blender, which will turn nuts to paste.
- VegexA concentrated yeast extract sold in the 1920s and 30s as a meatless bouillon and spread. Marmite, Vegemite or any yeast extract stands in; use it thinly, as it is intensely salty against the raisins and figs.
- Graham and whole wheat breadGraham bread here is a soft coarse-ground whole wheat loaf, sweeter and more tender than a modern seeded multigrain. Any plain wholemeal sandwich loaf works; slice it thin, since every filling in this list is soft.
- Honey marmalade, raisin syrupBoth are the sort of goods a health store of the period carried. Honey marmalade appears to be orange marmalade sweetened with honey — roughly half and half will do. Raisin syrup is the strained liquid from raisins simmered in water until it thickens.
- The tomato and spinach fillingCrushed tomato will soak through bread within minutes. Assemble that one to order, and drain the tomato pulp in a sieve first if it is going to sit at all.
- Flaxseed crackersA health-food-store item of the period, dense and slightly bitter. Any seeded whole-grain cracker serves; the point is a firm base under a sticky sweet filling.
Cook and Be Cool belongs to the hot-weather, no-cooking school of household writing, and this run of sandwiches sits close to the American vegetarian health-food movement associated with Battle Creek and the Seventh-day Adventist sanitariums, though the book makes no such claim itself. Graham bread, nut butters, ground-nut fillings and yeast extract were staples of that world: meatless, chewable protein for people who had given up flesh food, and goods of this kind were often sold through health stores and mail-order lists as well as grocers. Vegex in particular was a branded yeast extract of the interwar decades, marketed as a substitute for beef tea, and its appearance here points to those decades. The nut-and-condensed-milk paste sits oddly beside the raw carrot and beet, but both answer the same problem — how to build a filling substantial enough to be lunch without lighting a stove. That celery-apple-cream cheese and almond-butter-with-figs read as contemporary is a reminder of how much of modern health-food cooking descends from this line.