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Toasted Sandwiches
Mix a cream cheese with a little French dressing. Spread thin slices of white bread with the mixture and sprinkle with chopped nuts. Cover with bread and toast over a hot fire.
A three-ingredient sandwich that depends entirely on the dressing being sharp enough to cut the cheese. The instructions assume an open fire or a gas broiler, both of which need adapting.
- "A cream cheese"In this period cream cheese was commonly sold in small foil-wrapped packages of about 3 ounces, and was a fresher, softer product than the gum-stabilised block sold today. Use 3-4 oz of full-fat cream cheese at room temperature, or fresh farmer cheese if you want the older, looser texture.
- French dressingThis means a plain vinaigrette of oil, vinegar, salt and pepper, roughly three parts oil to one of vinegar, with no sugar and no ketchup. Bottled modern "French dressing" is sweet and orange and will ruin the filling. Beat in a teaspoon or two at a time until the cheese is spreadable but not slack.
- Toasting over a hot fireThis most likely means a wire toaster held over coals or a gas flame, which browns bread dry. A broiler set high, two to three minutes a side with the rack about four inches from the element, gives a similar result; watch it, as the edges scorch before the centre colours.
- Pan methodIf you would rather griddle them, butter the outside faces of the bread and cook in a dry skillet over medium heat until each side is brown. This is not what the book describes, but it holds the filling better and the nuts stay put.
- The nutsChop them fine and press them into the cheese rather than scattering them loose, or they fall out as soon as the sandwich is turned. Walnuts or pecans suit it well; almonds toast well but need a coarser chop.
- Bread"Thin slices of white bread" means a close-grained sandwich loaf cut thin; around a quarter-inch is a reasonable working thickness. Modern soft supermarket bread collapses under the spread; a firm white pain de mie or day-old bread behaves much better.
- Yield3-4 oz of cheese dresses about four sandwiches. Cut them in halves or fingers and serve at once, while the cheese is still warm and loose inside.
Toasted cheese-and-nut sandwiches like this one belong to the tea-room and luncheon cookery of the early twentieth century, when the sandwich moved out of the picnic basket and became a light meal in its own right. Meatless cookery of the period was written both for Lenten and vegetarian households and, around the First World War, for families urged to conserve meat, and such books leaned on cheese and nuts as the accepted protein substitutes. Nuts in particular carried a certain dietary-reform prestige in this period, promoted by sanitarium cooks and vegetarian writers as concentrated nourishment; pairing them with fresh cheese and an acid dressing was one way of making a meatless filling taste like something more than bread and butter.