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Nut and Cheese Sandwiches
Mix equal parts of grated Gruyère cheese and chopped English walnut meat; then season with salt and cayenne. Prepare as other sandwiches.
A three-ingredient filling with no quantities, no bread specified and no binder. The gaps are deliberate — Farmer assumed you had read the sandwich instructions above it — but a few of them need filling in.
- "Prepare as other sandwiches""Prepare as other sandwiches" points back to the book's general sandwich directions: thin slices of stale (day-old) bread, buttered, crusts usually trimmed. Butter matters here, since grated cheese and chopped nuts have nothing else to hold them to the bread.
- ProportionsThe recipe says only "equal parts," most likely by volume. About 1/2 cup each of grated cheese and chopped walnuts, with roughly 2 tablespoons of softened butter worked in, will fill six to eight small sandwiches.
- English walnutThe common walnut (Juglans regia), the name usually explained as distinguishing it from the native American black walnut, which is far stronger and would overwhelm the cheese. Use ordinary walnuts.
- Toast the nuts, or don'tThe original does not toast them. Five minutes in a 350F oven sharpens the flavour considerably. Nuts that have gone genuinely rancid, though, should be replaced rather than toasted.
- CayenneA pinch, meaning less than 1/8 teaspoon for this quantity. It is there as a seasoning for the cheese, not as heat you should be able to identify.
- Chop, don't grindThe nuts should be chopped fine enough to sit flat in a thin sandwich but coarse enough to read as texture. A food processor turns them to oily paste in seconds.
- HoldingAssemble no more than an hour or two ahead, wrap in a damp cloth and refrigerate. The butter firms up and the sandwiches cut cleanly into triangles or fingers.
Nut sandwiches turn up all over American cookbooks between about 1890 and 1930, and the reason is largely the afternoon tea and the ladies' luncheon — occasions that called for something substantial enough to be food but delicate enough to eat from a plate on your knee. Nuts also carried a particular prestige in this period as a protein that was not meat, championed by vegetarian and health-reform writers, and the pairing with cheese made a filling that a hostess could describe as nourishing without apology. Fannie Farmer's sandwich chapter is essentially a list of variations on a single method, and this entry's brevity — "prepare as other sandwiches" — shows how the book was meant to be used: learn the technique once, then run through the fillings.