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Nut and Raisin Sandwiches
Take equal quantities of nuts and raisins; moisten with cream or grape juice and spread on thin slices of bread.
Barely a recipe — a ratio and a method — but it works if you treat the filling as a paste rather than a scatter of loose bits.
- Grind, don't just chopEqual parts nuts and raisins can go through a food processor (or a hand food chopper) until they form a coarse, cohesive paste. Whole or roughly chopped pieces will roll out of the sandwich the moment it is cut.
- Moisten sparinglyAdd cream or grape juice a teaspoon at a time. Raisins release their own moisture as they are worked, and too much liquid soaks the bread through within an hour.
- Which nutsWalnuts and pecans are the obvious choices, and their slight bitterness keeps the raisins from cloying. Almonds work; peanuts read as a different sandwich entirely.
- Grape juiceBottled unfermented grape juice was commercially available in this era and is presumably what is intended. Modern versions tend to be sweeter, so a smaller quantity goes further.
- The breadFor "thin slices", a firm white sandwich loaf cut about 1/4 inch works well, and buttering lightly to the edges before the filling goes on gives a moisture barrier the recipe does not mention.
- QuantityA cup each of nuts and raisins makes roughly a cup and a half of filling, enough for about ten rounds of bread, or forty tea-size fingers with crusts removed.
- HoldingMade ahead, they keep two or three hours covered with a barely damp towel under plastic. With cream rather than juice, keep them refrigerated.
Filling sandwiches with a sweet nut paste belongs to the era of the hand-cranked food chopper, which put grinding within easy reach of the home kitchen and produced a wave of chopped-nut, chopped-olive and chopped-date fillings in American cookbooks between about 1900 and 1930. The alternative of grape juice for cream also reflects the period — commercially bottled unfermented grape juice was heavily promoted in the temperance years, and it turns up in cookbooks of the 1910s as a wholesome, faintly festive liquid for punches, gelatines and, as here, moistening a filling.