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Nut and Raisin or Date Filling
1½ C seeded raisins or dates 1/2 C chopped nuts Juice of one-half lemon Put raisins or dates through food chopper with nuts. Blend with lemon juice. Spread between slices of well buttered graham or white bread. 3 loaves bread 1/2 lb. butter
A church-supper sandwich filling, written for a hand-cranked food chopper and for someone making sandwiches by the dozen. The proportions on the page do not quite line up, which is worth sorting out before you start.
- The quantity problemTwo cups of fruit and nut paste will not fill three loaves of sandwiches; that is closer to a single loaf's worth, thinly spread. Either read the ingredient list as one batch and the bread note as the committee's shopping list, or multiply the filling by three or four for the full three loaves.
- "Seeded raisins"Seeded means the seeds have been removed, as opposed to seedless varieties that never had them. Any ordinary dark raisin works; Medjool or Deglet Noor dates both grind well, and dates give a sweeter, stickier paste.
- Food chopperA food processor does this in seconds, but pulse rather than run it — continuous grinding turns the mixture into a gummy ball that tears bread. Aim for a coarse, still-flecked paste. A meat grinder with the coarse plate reproduces the original texture most closely.
- Graham breadHere it means a whole-wheat loaf of the sort associated with Sylvester Graham's coarse unsifted flour, not the sweet cracker. Any close-crumbed whole-wheat sandwich bread stands in.
- The lemon juice mattersIt is not for flavour so much as to keep the paste loose enough to spread and to stop the fruit reading as cloying. Half a lemon is about 1½ tablespoons; add it a little at a time and stop when the mixture just holds together.
- Butter the bread properlyHalf a pound of butter for three loaves works out to a generous coat. Softened butter spread to the crust on both slices helps seal the bread against the wet filling, which is the difference between a sandwich that survives an hour on a tea table and one that goes soggy.
- Yield and holdingA loaf makes about ten or eleven sandwiches, so cut into quarters that is forty or more small ones. The filling keeps three or four days covered in the refrigerator; bring it back to room temperature before spreading or it will drag the crumb.
Ground fruit-and-nut sandwich fillings turn up constantly in American community cookbooks of the early twentieth century, and their spread owes a good deal to the domestic food chopper — a clamp-on cast-iron grinder that made short work of sticky dried fruit and was sold from the 1880s and 1890s onward, though it seems to have become genuinely widespread in kitchens only in the 1900s and 1910s. Compilations like this one tended to collect recipes sized for church suppers and ladies' aid luncheons rather than for a family table, and the page ends with a bulk note for three loaves of bread and half a pound of butter. The choice between raisins and dates was largely a matter of what the pantry held; both were shelf-stable, inexpensive, and sweet enough to need no added sugar. Graham bread appearing as an equal option to white reflects a long-running American enthusiasm for coarse whole-meal flour, generally traced to the health reformer Sylvester Graham and still carrying a faint air of virtue at the time this book was assembled.