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Peanut Sandwiches
One cup vinegar, 1/4 cup brown sugar, let boil then add 1 teaspoon Five Roses flour, 1 egg, 1 teaspoon pepper, salt and mustard. Let cool, then add 1 cup crushed peanuts. Put between thin slices buttered bread.
This is a boiled dressing — a sweet-sour cooked custard thickened with flour and egg — stirred into crushed peanuts. The whole thing hinges on how you handle the egg.
- Temper the eggDo not drop a whole egg into boiling vinegar syrup. Beat the egg with the teaspoon of flour and a spoonful or two of the hot liquid, then whisk that back into the pan and cook over low heat, stirring, until it thickens and coats a spoon (about 175F). It will curdle if it boils hard.
- Cook it throughOnce it thickens, hold it over gentle heat for a minute or two without letting it boil. The acidity of the vinegar helps, but the egg still needs the heat; a dressing pulled off at the first sign of thickening is undercooked.
- VinegarA cup of vinegar plus a cup of sugar is aggressively sharp by modern taste. The recipe does not say which vinegar; cider vinegar was common in kitchens of this period and its flavour is milder than modern distilled white, which tastes harsher at the same strength.
- That teaspoon of pepperOne full teaspoon of black pepper in about two cups of filling is a great deal of heat. Half a teaspoon is nearer to what a modern palate expects, with salt and dry mustard to taste — the original gives no quantity for either.
- Peanuts"Crushed peanuts" means whole nuts pounded coarsely, not peanut butter; shelled roasted peanuts are the likely intention, though the recipe does not specify. Chop them by hand or pulse briefly; a food processor run too long turns them to paste and you lose the texture the recipe is built on.
- ThickeningOne teaspoon of flour in a cup of liquid gives a loose dressing, not a spread. It thickens further as it cools and again once the peanuts absorb it. Let it cool completely before judging the consistency.
- Yield and keepingEnough filling for roughly 12 to 16 small sandwiches. Butter the bread right to the edges — it keeps the acid dressing from soaking through — and refrigerate the filling, using it within two or three days.
The Five Roses Cook Book was published by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Montreal and distributed to Canadian households that bought its flour, which explains why a teaspoon of flour in a peanut dressing is named by brand. Its sandwich chapter — often referred to as "Dainty Sandwiches" — belongs to the era of the afternoon tea and the church social, when thin buttered bread with a savoury filling was the standard offering. Peanuts moved from a snack sold in paper cones to a respectable sandwich ingredient in North America around the turn of the twentieth century, helped along by the commercial grinding of peanut butter in the 1890s; here the nuts are still crushed at home and bound with a cooked boiled dressing, the same vinegar-sugar-egg mixture that dressed cabbage and potato salads in the same books. Boiled dressing is often said to have served as a household alternative to mayonnaise, being cheaper and more stable in a cool pantry.