Peanut Strips
Peanut butter
Egg-white
Lemon-juice
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 quantity-free recipe of the sort common in 1900s pastry chapters — it assumes you have puff or trimmings paste on hand and know how thin "very thin" means. A few notes on the vocabulary and the oven.
- "Paste" means pastryIn this book paste is pie or puff pastry dough, not a spread. Trimmings of rough puff work best here; ordinary short crust will bake up drier but still holds together. Roll it to about 1/8 inch or thinner — the strips should shatter, not chew.
- A quick ovenRoughly a hot oven, usually read today as somewhere around 400-450F. The high heat is what lifts and blisters the thin double layer of paste; a cooler oven risks drying the strips before they rise.
- The inverted baking-tinBaking on the underside of an upturned pan turns up in period instructions for thin flat pastry: it let the sheet be slid off whole and gave the edges direct heat. A flat, rimless modern baking sheet does the same job.
- Mark, do not cutScoring the strips before baking lets them separate cleanly afterward while keeping the sheet intact, so the layers stay sealed at the edges. Cutting all the way through at this stage risks the two sheets separating in the oven.
- Peanut butter then and nowCommercial peanut butter of the period was unhydrogenated and unstabilized, and often unsweetened; the lemon juice presumably serves to loosen it to a brushable consistency as well as to season it. Modern stabilized peanut butter generally needs less thinning; add lemon juice a teaspoon at a time until it spreads without tearing the paste.
- ProportionsNone are given. For a standard half-sheet of pastry, roughly 1/3 cup peanut butter, 2 to 3 teaspoons lemon juice, one egg white and 1/2 cup finely chopped peanuts is in the right range.
- The second bakeThree minutes at that heat is enough to set the egg white and toast the nuts. Watch it — chopped peanuts scorch quickly, and the strips are already fully baked.
- Yield and keepingYield depends entirely on how large a sheet you roll; at four inches by one inch the strips are small, so expect a good many from a full sheet. They soften within a day; recrisp them for a few minutes in a hot oven rather than storing them airtight while still warm.
Peanut butter was a novelty ingredient when this book was compiled, not the pantry staple it became. It entered American cooking in the 1890s largely through health-food circles — John Harvey Kellogg's sanitarium work at Battle Creek is generally credited with popularizing ground peanut paste as a digestible protein — and by the 1900s it had moved into ordinary grocery trade and, from there, into the fancy-pastry pages of household manuals. Recipes like this one show cooks working out what to do with it beyond a sandwich: here it is treated exactly as a pastry cook would treat almond paste or a nut filling, thinned with acid, laminated between sheets of paste, and finished with an egg-white glaze and chopped nuts. The suggestion that they suit coffee or afternoon tea places them among the small dry biscuits and sticks a hostess kept on hand for callers.