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Peanut Butter Sandwiches
Mix a cream cheese with two scant tablespoons of peanut butter, and blend thoroughly. Season with salt and spread between thin slices of buttered graham bread.
A three-ingredient spread from the era when peanut butter was still a health-food novelty rather than a pantry staple. The only real puzzles are the cheese and the bread.
- "A cream cheese"The indefinite article signals a unit, not a quantity: a small fresh cheese sold in a foil-wrapped cake, of the order of a few ounces. A modern 3 oz block of cream cheese or Neufchatel is a reasonable substitute; the full 8 oz brick would swamp two tablespoons of peanut butter.
- Bring the cheese to room temperatureThis is the hinge. Cold cream cheese and stiff peanut butter will not blend, and forcing them tears the crumb of thinly sliced bread. Let both sit out until soft, then work them together with a fork or paddle until uniform.
- Graham breadWhole-wheat bread made with coarse, unsifted flour in the manner promoted by Sylvester Graham. Any dense whole-wheat sandwich loaf works; the sweetened graham crackers on the supermarket shelf are a different product entirely.
- Peanut butter of the periodOld-style peanut butter was ground peanuts and little else, stiffer and drier than modern stabilized brands and often unsalted, which may be why salt is called for separately. If using a sweetened commercial spread, taste before salting.
- "Scant tablespoons"Just under a level tablespoon each, so roughly 2 tablespoons total. The proportion is deliberate: the cheese dominates and the peanut simply flavors it.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. A cheese of this size with two tablespoons of peanut butter would make only a few sandwiches, suited to cutting into halves or fingers.
- KeepingThe buttered bread is there to keep moisture from the filling soaking the crumb. Made a short time ahead, wrapped in a damp cloth and kept cool, these should hold; left much longer they are likely to go soft.
Peanut butter arrived in American cookery in the 1890s as an invalid and vegetarian food, promoted by sanitarium kitchens as an easily digested source of protein for people not eating meat, and it turns up constantly in meatless cookbooks of the following thirty years. Pairing it with fresh cheese and graham bread doubles down on that pedigree: graham flour was the emblem of nineteenth-century dietary reform, generally traced to the preaching of Sylvester Graham in the 1830s, and the two ingredients together were understood as a complete, wholesome mouthful rather than a treat. The recipe also reflects how peanut butter was first eaten in polite households, thinned or softened with something else and cut into delicate tea sandwiches, well before it settled into its later partnership with jelly.