Home › Sandwiches › Brown and White Bread Sandwiches
Brown and White Bread Sandwiches
Cut thin slices of each, spread with butter and nuts and press together. Any filling desired using one slice of each.
A two-line sketch rather than a formula, typical of the sandwich chapters in books of this period, where the cook was expected to supply proportions. The only real technique is slicing thin enough that the two contrasting breads read as a pattern.
- What "brown bread" means hereIn a 1920 American sandwich list this is usually a whole-wheat or graham loaf, sliced from a standard pan loaf. Steamed Boston brown bread can be used, but it crumbles and is best cut thick and buttered generously.
- Use day-old breadFresh bread tears under a thin cut. A loaf baked the day before, or one chilled for half an hour, slices cleanly at about 1/4 inch with a long serrated knife.
- Butter first, alwaysButter softened to spreading consistency seals the crumb so a moist filling does not soak through. Cream it with a fork rather than melting it.
- The nutsWalnuts, pecans or almonds, chopped fine and pressed into the butter. Coarse pieces make the slices slide apart when cut; a few minutes of chopping is the difference between a sandwich and a pile.
- Trimming and cuttingTrim the crusts after assembling, not before, so the two slices stay aligned. Cut into fingers or triangles with a single firm stroke.
- Holding themAssembled sandwiches dry out fast. Cover with waxed paper and a barely damp towel, refrigerate, and cut just before serving.
- YieldA standard loaf of each bread gives roughly 20 whole sandwiches, or 40 to 60 tea-sized pieces, on about 6 to 8 ounces of butter.
Sandwiches of this kind belong to the tea table rather than the lunch pail: the point is the visual contrast of dark and light bread, the same instinct that produced checkerboard and ribbon sandwiches in the same era. Mary A. Wilson wrote for the household reader of about 1920, when commercial sliced bread did not yet exist and every sandwich began with a knife and a whole loaf, so a recipe could reasonably assume the cook knew how thin "thin" should be. Nut-and-butter fillings were a staple of the period's afternoon entertaining, cheap, meatless and able to sit for an hour without spoiling, which is why they turn up throughout the sandwich chapters of American cookbooks between the 1890s and the 1930s.