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Nut Salad Sandwiches
Grind English walnuts or hickory nuts in your meat grinder, mix with an equal quantity of celery chopped extremely fine and add to this mixture mayonnaise made with plenty of lemon juice. Have white bread made from Five Roses flour cut thin, brush lightly with melted butter, lay on a crisp lettuce leaf, spread this with the nut and celery mixture, lay the second slice of bread upon it and serve at once.
A tea sandwich from the era when the sandwich loaf and the meat grinder were both new household fixtures. Nothing here is difficult; the whole thing hinges on texture and on assembling at the last minute.
- The hinge: serve at onceThe recipe closes with "serve at once," and it matters. Celery weeps and mayonnaise soaks, so a sandwich built more than a few minutes ahead turns limp. Assemble as close to serving as possible, or hold the filling chilled and spread to order.
- Buttering the breadBrushing melted butter on the crumb is not a flourish but a moisture barrier between the dressing and the bread. Very soft, barely melted butter spread thin works better than fully liquid butter, which soaks in rather than sitting on the surface.
- Grinding the nutsA meat grinder produces a coarse, dry crumb. A food processor will turn walnuts to paste in seconds, so pulse in short bursts, or chop by hand for a filling that still has some bite.
- Hickory nutsRarely sold commercially now; they are close to pecans in flavour and pecans substitute directly. Toasting the nuts briefly at 350F and cooling them fully before grinding deepens the flavour, though the original does not call for it.
- Celery, chopped extremely fineUse the inner pale stalks and string the outer ones with a peeler. Salting the chopped celery for ten minutes and pressing it dry in a towel removes water that would otherwise thin the mayonnaise.
- The mayonnaiseIn 1913 this meant a hand-beaten dressing on raw yolks. Commercial mayonnaise is made with pasteurized egg and keeps far better in a sandwich left out on a tea table; if you make your own, use pasteurized eggs and keep the filling refrigerated. The lemon juice is not optional, as it is what cuts the fat of the nuts.
- BreadA fine-crumbed white sandwich loaf, cut thin as the recipe directs. Day-old bread cuts far more cleanly than fresh. Trimming the crusts is usual for tea sandwiches of this type, though this recipe does not ask for it.
- YieldThe original gives no quantities at all, only equal parts nuts and celery, so scale the filling to the number of sandwiches you need.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and distributed to buyers of its flour, which is why white bread "made from Five Roses flour" appears in a recipe that otherwise has nothing to do with baking. Its sandwich section belongs to the North American afternoon-tea sandwich vogue of the years before the First World War, when thin-cut, crustless sandwiches with ground fillings were a standard of the ladies' luncheon and the church social. Nuts and celery were a natural pair for the purpose: celery was a prestige salad vegetable, often served on its own in a cut-glass dish, and the domestic meat grinder made it trivial to reduce walnuts to a spreadable crumb. The combination of nut, celery and mayonnaise is close to a Waldorf salad, though without the apple that defines it.