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Toasted Salad Sandwiches
Work a cream cheese and moisten with a little well-seasoned French Dressing. Cut graham bread into ¼ inch slices, spread with cheese and sprinkle with finely chopped nuts. Put together in pairs, remove crusts and cut in finger shapes. Place in oven until delicately toasted, pile evenly on the serving dish and serve with a green salad.
A club-style tea sandwich that gets a brief turn in the oven. Nothing here is difficult; the two things to settle are the slice thickness and how loose to make the cheese.
- Quarter-inch slicesThe printed page reads quarter-inch slices, as our text now gives. Cut them thin enough to pair, trim and slice into fingers that will toast through evenly.
- Cream cheese, then and now"A cream cheese" meant one of the small foil-wrapped soft fresh cheeses sold by the piece, commonly around three ounces. Bring the cheese fully to room temperature before working it or it will tear the bread.
- French dressing means vinaigretteIn this period French dressing was oil, vinegar, salt and pepper whisked together, not the sweet orange bottled dressing of the later twentieth century. Add it a teaspoon at a time until the cheese is spreadable but not runny, or it will soak the crumb.
- Oven heatThe instruction is only "until delicately toasted," with no temperature given. A fairly hot oven and a short stay is the sensible reading: brown the outside before the filling warms through and weeps.
- NutsThe recipe specifies only "finely chopped nuts"; walnuts or pecans are the usual choices and both toast well. Chop them fine enough to sit flat under the top slice, or the sandwich will not close.
- Order of operationsTrim crusts and cut into fingers before toasting, as written. Cutting warm sandwiches drags the cheese and the fingers lose their edges.
- Yield and timingAn 8 oz block of cheese and about twelve slices of bread give roughly two dozen fingers, enough for six to eight as a salad course. Assemble ahead and refrigerate, but toast at the last minute; they are dull cold.
Graham bread takes its name from Sylvester Graham, the Presbyterian minister and dietary reformer of the 1830s who preached coarse unsifted wheat flour as a moral as much as a nutritional matter, and by 1900 "graham" was generally understood to mean whole-wheat bread on American bakery shelves. The sandwich itself belongs to the great age of the ladies' luncheon, when a crustless finger sandwich served alongside a green salad constituted a whole light meal for a club meeting or a church social; toasting it was a small refinement that let a cook send something warm to the table without a chafing dish.