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Grape Sandwiches
Seed and slice thin, skinned, white grapes; mix with chopped nuts and apples, binding together with French dressing and spread on buttered rounds of thin-sliced white bread.
A tea sandwich of the ladies'-luncheon era, and it depends entirely on keeping the filling dry enough not to wreck the bread. Assemble it within an hour of serving.
- French dressing meant vinaigretteIn this period French dressing is oil, vinegar, salt and pepper whisked together, roughly three parts oil to one of vinegar. It is not the sweet orange bottled dressing sold under that name in the United States today, which would be wrong here.
- White grapes"White" grapes are what we call green grapes. The recipe's instruction to seed and skin suggests a seeded table variety rather than a modern seedless one; seedless Thompson or similar need only halving and thin slicing, and their skins are tender enough to leave on.
- Bind sparinglyUse just enough dressing to coat, a teaspoon or two for a cupful of filling. Any excess pools and soaks through the bread within minutes.
- Drain the fruitSliced grapes and apple shed juice as they sit. Let the mixed fruit stand in a sieve for ten minutes and discard what drips before dressing it.
- Keep the apple paleToss the chopped apple with a little of the dressing's vinegar, or a squeeze of lemon, as you cut it. A firm tart variety holds its shape better than a soft one.
- NutsWalnuts or pecans suit the mixture; chop them coarsely so they do not turn to paste, and toast them briefly if you want more flavour.
- Butter as waterproofingThe butter is structural, not just flavour. Soften it to spreading consistency and take it right to the edge of each round so it seals the crumb against the juice.
- Rounds and yieldCut the rounds with a small cutter from thin-sliced sandwich bread. The recipe gives no quantities or yield; a cupful of filling will cover a dozen or more rounds depending on the size of the cutter and how thickly it is spread. The recipe says only to spread the filling on buttered rounds, so whether they are served open or paired is left to you.
Fruit sandwiches belong to the American tea and luncheon table of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when thin bread, a cutter and a bowl of chopped something were the whole apparatus of light entertaining. They multiplied alongside the fruit salad, which had been given its own vogue by the same combination of apple, grape, nut and dressing that fills these rounds. The instruction to seed and skin the grapes is telling, and points to the slipskin varieties widely grown in the eastern states, which peeled easily.