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Peanut Sandwiches
Chop freshly roasted peanuts very fine; then pound them in a mortar until smooth; season with salt and moisten with thick cream.
This is peanut butter made in the kitchen a few years before it became a jar on the shelf. The whole recipe hinges on the nuts being warm and freshly roasted, since that is what makes them give up their oil under the pestle.
- Roast them yourselfRaw shelled peanuts, spread on a sheet pan in a 350F oven for 12 to 15 minutes until fragrant and just colored, then rubbed in a towel to loosen the papery skins. Cocktail peanuts are already salted and often fried in added oil, which throws off both the seasoning and the texture.
- Mortar or machineA food processor does in a fraction of the time what the mortar does by hand. Run the warm nuts alone first until they clump and then turn glossy and loose, before adding anything else.
- The cream is the variableNo quantity is given. Start with a tablespoon of heavy cream per cup of ground nuts and add more only until the paste spreads without tearing bread. Too much and it will weep and soak the slice.
- SaltAbout a quarter teaspoon per cup of nuts, added at the end and tasted, since roasted peanuts vary in how much salt they seem to want.
- This is not shelf-stablePeanut butter keeps because it is very low in moisture. Cream makes this a dairy spread: refrigerate it and use it within two days.
- YieldA cup of shelled peanuts gives roughly two-thirds of a cup of paste, enough for six to eight small sandwiches.
- The breadButter the slices before spreading, which keeps the cream from sinking in.
Ground nut pastes were promoted through the 1890s as digestible protein by sanitarium and vegetarian cooks, John Harvey Kellogg's Battle Creek operation among them, and such pastes were still commonly made in the kitchen rather than bought, which may be why this entry tells you to pound the nuts rather than open a jar. Peanuts themselves were cheap and abundant, a Southern crop that had spread north through street vending and roasting carts after the Civil War, so the raw material cost little. The addition of cream softens a paste that plain grinding leaves stiff for thin bread.