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Filling (C worth salted peanuts Small)
10c worth salted peanuts Small can pimentoes ½ doz. sweet pickles 10c cream cheese Grind all ingredients together. Moisten with mayonnaise, and let stand a short time. This recipe will make twelve full double sandwiches.
A club-sandwich filling from the era when quantities were quoted in coins rather than ounces. The measurements need translating before you shop.
- "10c worth" is not a measurementPrices like these were legible to the original readers and are guesswork now. Ten cents may have bought something on the order of a few ounces of salted peanuts and a small bar of cream cheese, but any figure is an estimate; adjust to taste.
- Cream cheese of the periodTen cents' worth was probably a small bar of the unstabilized cream cheese then sold, likely firmer than the spreads sold today. Use a 3 oz package of full-fat block cream cheese, not whipped or tub-style, or the filling will not hold.
- Small can pimentoesA modern 4 oz jar of roasted pimientos is a reasonable stand-in for a "small can." Drain it well and blot dry, or the mixture turns watery once the mayonnaise goes in.
- Sweet picklesA dozen and a half counted out implies small whole sweet pickles rather than spears or slices. Squeeze them out before grinding; the syrup they sit in is the other main source of excess liquid here.
- GrindingThe original assumed a hand-cranked food chopper on its coarse plate. A food processor pulsed in short bursts gets you there, but stop while the peanuts are still gritty rather than pasty.
- The resting step"Let stand a short time" gives the ground peanuts a chance to take up loose moisture so the mixture spreads more easily; a short rest is all the recipe asks for.
- Yield and breadTwelve "full double sandwiches" most likely means twelve whole sandwiches of two slices each, though the term is not defined here. The recipe specifies no bread.
Peanut-and-pimiento fillings ran through American community cookbooks from roughly the 1910s into the 1940s, when sandwich loaves and cut-up tea sandwiches were the standard offering at church suppers, club luncheons and card parties. All three of the assertive ingredients here were products of industrial food: canned pimientos, which arrived with Spanish pepper seed planted in Georgia in an industry usually dated to the early 1910s, factory cream cheese, and salted peanuts sold loose by the scoop. Pricing ingredients by the dime, as this contributor does, is often taken as a habit of fundraising cookbooks compiled from handwritten cards; presumably it told a neighbor what to ask for at the counter, and it is the main reason such recipes now need interpreting rather than simply following.