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Spanish Sandwich Spread
6 hard boiled eggs 10c worth salted peanuts 1 small size jar of pimentoes 15c worth dried beef 1 small bottle of sweet pickles 1½ pkg. Kraft's Swiss cheese Mayonnaise to mix well for spreading easily Put the six first ingredients through the meat grinder. This makes a large amount but keeps well if placed where it is cool.
A church-supper sandwich filling built around a hand-cranked meat grinder and priced in nickels. The quantities need translating before you start.
- "10c worth"Prices, not measures, and the recipe gives no date to price against. A dime at an early-twentieth-century counter bought a few ounces; dried beef cost more per pound than salted peanuts, so expect less of it. Start at roughly 3-4 oz of each and adjust to taste.
- Dried beefAir-dried salt-cured beef, sold sliced paper-thin in jars or packets (chipped beef). It is very salty; rinse and pat dry if you want the spread less aggressive, and hold back on any added salt.
- Kraft's Swiss cheeseThis is the pasteurized process loaf, not a wedge of Emmental. Package sizes of the period varied and the intended amount is genuinely uncertain; somewhere between 8 and 12 oz is a reasonable reading. Process cheese grinds into a smooth paste, where real Swiss will shred into strings.
- Pimientos and sweet picklesA "small jar" of pimientos is the 4 oz jar still sold today. "A small bottle" of sweet pickles is vague; treat it as roughly a cup's worth and drain both well or the spread will weep.
- The grinderA food processor does the job, but pulse rather than run it, and do the peanuts separately so they stay in visible pieces. Ground to a paste, the whole thing turns to putty.
- Mayonnaise lastGrind everything first, then add mayonnaise a spoonful at a time. The cheese and eggs already carry fat, and too much dressing makes a filling that soaks bread through.
- "Keeps well where it is cool"That meant a cellar or an icebox. Chopped egg and mayonnaise want the refrigerator and three days at the outside; this is not a make-ahead-for-a-week spread by current standards.
- YieldThe warning that it "makes a large amount" is accurate: expect somewhere around a quart to a quart and a half, enough for a good many sandwiches. Halve it for a household.
Ground sandwich fillings like this one belong to the era of the hand-cranked meat grinder and of community cookbooks assembled from contributors' own kitchens. "Spanish" in American cookery of the period rarely meant Spain; it was shorthand for anything with pimiento or red pepper in it, the same logic that gave us Spanish rice and Spanish omelet. The recipe also dates itself by naming a brand: Kraft's pasteurized process cheese, patented in the 1910s and sold in tins and loaves, was prized in community cookbooks because it blended smoothly instead of separating, and it was often said to keep without refrigeration. Pricing ingredients in cents rather than pounds was ordinary in these compilations, since contributors assumed a reader standing at the same grocery counter they used.