Home › Sandwiches › Nut Sandwiches
Nut Sandwiches
Make bread and butter sandwiches, adding chopped nuts and chopped olives to the cream dressing with which they are spread.
A one-line recipe that assumes you already know the book's cream dressing and the conventions of the tea-table. The variables worth controlling are moisture and thickness.
- "Cream dressing"Not whipped cream. In books of this period it means either a cooked (boiled) dressing thickened with egg and flour and finished with cream, or mayonnaise thinned with cream. Either works; a cooked dressing holds up better against wet olives.
- Both butter and dressingThe butter is doing structural work as much as flavor. A thin film of softened butter on each slice helps seal the crumb so the dressing does not soak through; without it the sandwiches are likelier to go limp.
- Drain the olivesChopped brine-cured olives shed liquid steadily. Chop them, then spread on a towel and blot before folding into the dressing, or the filling will slacken and weep.
- NutsWalnuts, pecans or almonds all suit. Toasting them lightly and cooling them fully before chopping gives far more flavor and keeps them from turning soft in the dressing. Chop fine — coarse pieces tear thin bread.
- ProportionsThe original gives none. A workable filling is about 1/2 cup chopped nuts and 1/4 cup chopped olives to 1/2 cup dressing, which fills roughly six sandwiches. Adjust to a mixture that mounds on a spoon rather than runs.
- BreadA close-crumbed sandwich loaf, sliced thin, suits this, though the recipe does not specify. Day-old bread cuts cleaner than fresh. Trim crusts after filling and cut into triangles or fingers for a tea plate.
- Holding timeThese can be made an hour or two ahead if covered with a barely damp towel and refrigerated. Beyond that the nuts soften and the olive brine wins.
Meatless cookbooks proliferated in the English-speaking world in the first decades of the twentieth century, driven by two separate currents: vegetarian and health-reform movements with roots in the nineteenth century, and the food-conservation campaigns of the First World War, when meatless days were urged on households as a patriotic measure. Nuts were among the foods offered in answer to the question of what would replace meat, described by home economists of the era as concentrated protein and fat much as beans, peas and lentils were, and nut-and-olive fillings became a fixture of the tea and luncheon sandwich. Olives themselves were a mark of the fashionable American table around 1900, newly cheap and widely available in bottles, and they turn up chopped into dressings, cheese spreads and salads with a frequency that can surprise modern readers. The recipe's brevity is itself typical: it is written as a variation, assuming the cook has already learned the book's cream dressing and needs only to be told what to stir into it.