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Fruit Sandwiches
Spread bread and butter sandwiches with cooked dates, figs or prunes, moistened with a little lemon juice and chopped fine. Chopped nuts may be added.
A one-line formula rather than a recipe, and it works as long as the fruit paste is stiff enough not to soak the bread. A few points on proportions and handling.
- "Cooked" dried fruitDates and figs need only a short simmer in water to soften, perhaps 10 minutes; prunes take 20-25 unless they are the softened kind sold ready to eat. Drain well and let them cool before chopping, or the steam will wet the bread.
- Chop after cooking, not beforeChop after cooking -- The wording is ambiguous, but the order that makes practical sense is to cook the fruit, moisten with lemon, then chop fine so the juice is worked through. A food processor gives a smoother paste; a knife on a wet board gives a coarser one that holds together better.
- Working proportionsAbout 1 cup of cooked pitted fruit to 1-2 teaspoons lemon juice makes enough filling for six to eight sandwiches. The lemon is there to cut the sweetness and keep the paste from tasting flat, so add it a little at a time and taste.
- Butter both slicesThe butter is not incidental. A thin film on the facing side of each slice seals the crumb against the moisture in the fruit, which matters if the sandwiches are made more than an hour ahead.
- NutsWalnuts or pecans would be the likely choice. Toast and chop them fairly fine; large pieces make the sandwich tear when cut.
- BreadA close-textured white or wholemeal sandwich loaf, sliced thin, suits this far better than an open artisan crumb, which the filling will push through. Trim the crusts and cut into fingers or triangles if serving at tea.
Fruit sandwiches belong to the tea table and the lunch box rather than the dinner table, and they turn up throughout early twentieth-century American household cookery, where dates, figs and prunes were among the cheapest sweet things a pantry reliably held. Dried fruit shipped and stored well before domestic refrigeration was common. A book of meatless cookery has a particular reason to include them: sandwiches were the standard portable meal, and conventional fillings leaned heavily on cold meat or fish, so the compilers needed to supply substitutes built on fruit, nuts, cheese and eggs. The lemon juice here does the work that a savoury filling would otherwise do, keeping a very sweet paste from cloying.