Peanut Strips
Peanut butter Lemon-juice Egg-white Chopped peanuts Roll paste very thin. Place on inverted baking-tin. Brush half with peanut butter thinned with lemon-juice. Cover with the other half and with a sharp knife mark in strips four inches long and one inch wide. Set in a quick oven. When baked, brush with white of egg diluted with one teaspoon of cold water and sprinkle with finely chopped peanuts. Return to the oven for about three minutes, until the nuts are slightly crisped, then cut apart. These are excellent with coffee or afternoon tea.
A Delineator-style formula: it lists ingredients without quantities and assumes you already have puff or short paste on hand. The technique is straightforward once you know what the vessel and the oven mean.
- Quantities are left to the cookThe ingredient list gives no amounts at all. As a starting point, try roughly 8 oz of pastry, 3-4 tablespoons of peanut butter, and enough lemon juice (a teaspoon or two) to bring it to a spreadable paste; these are modern estimates, not the book's.
- A quick ovenRead that as roughly 400-425F. Thin paste in strips should bake quickly; watch the colour rather than the clock, since a sheet rolled very thin can go from pale to scorched in a minute.
- Inverted baking-tinThe sheet is baked on the underside of an upturned pan, which gives a flat, unrimmed surface to roll onto and slide off. A modern rimless cookie sheet or an inverted half-sheet pan does the same job.
- Mark, then cutThe recipe scores the strips before baking and cuts them apart only after. Scoring gives you clean break lines to finish with a knife once the strips have set and cooled slightly.
- Peanut butter has changedIf this predates the spread of hydrogenated, stabilised jars, the peanut butter to hand would have been looser and prone to separating. With a stiff modern brand you may need a little extra juice or water to get a spreadable paste.
- The egg-white glazeApplied only after the first bake, so it sets as a thin varnish that holds the chopped nuts. The recipe wants about three minutes back in the oven, just until the nuts are slightly crisped.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; only the strip size, four inches by one inch. From an 8 oz batch rolled thin you might expect somewhere around two dozen.
Peanut butter was still a relatively new pantry item when this book appeared, having moved from health-sanatorium food and lunch-counter novelty into general grocery stock over the first quarter of the twentieth century.