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Peanut Butter and Fruit
1/4 cup figs 1/4 cup raisins 2 tablespoons light corn-sirup 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/2 cup peanut butter Wash figs and raisins and put through a food-chopper. Add salt, peanut butter, lemon-juice and corn-sirup, and mix well.
A stiff, sweet sandwich paste built on dried fruit and peanut butter, meant to be spread on soft bread. It comes together in a few minutes with a food processor.
- FigsDried figs, not fresh. Snip off the hard stem ends before grinding or they will leave woody threads through the paste. A quarter cup is roughly 3 to 4 whole dried figs.
- Food-chopperThe hand-cranked grinder of the period. A food processor does the same job; pulse the figs and raisins rather than running it continuously, or the fruit will pack into a gummy ball around the blade.
- Corn-sirupLight corn syrup, unchanged and still on shelves. It is here for pliability as much as sweetness, keeping the paste spreadable rather than crumbly.
- Lemon juiceThe method calls for lemon juice though no quantity is given in the ingredient list. A tablespoon suits this volume, and the acid is worth including: it keeps the fruit and peanut butter from tasting flat.
- Peanut butterCommercial peanut butter of the period was generally less sweet and less emulsified than most jarred brands now. Natural-style, stirred well, is closer to the original; if using a sweetened brand, cut the corn syrup back.
- SaltHalf a teaspoon suggests peanut butter with little or no salt of its own. Most supermarket peanut butter is already salted, so start with a pinch and taste.
- YieldAbout one cup of filling, enough for four to five sandwiches. It stiffens in the refrigerator, so let it stand at room temperature before spreading.
Peanut butter moved from health-food curiosity to pantry staple in the United States between the 1890s and the 1920s, and by the time New Delineator Recipes appeared it was familiar enough for a magazine kitchen to treat a jar of it as an ordinary store-cupboard item. Sandwich sections of the period carry many such compound spreads, in which peanut butter is bound with dates, figs, raisins, honey or chopped olives; the appeal of a filling like this was that it would not soak the bread and would hold up in a lunch pail. Dried figs and raisins were cheap and shelf-stable year-round, and grinding them was routine work in a kitchen equipped with a food-chopper.