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Nut Sandwiches
Pignolias or pine nuts, black walnuts, almonds, and pecans may all be put through a meat chopper, mixed, a very little salt added, and spread over thin, buttered slices of brown or white bread. Chopped or minced peanuts are also popular for sandwiches.
A sketch rather than a formula, which is typical of the sandwich chapters of 1911. A few decisions have to be made for it.
- ProportionsNo quantities are given. Roughly 1 cup of mixed nuts, ground, will fill six to eight rounds of sandwiches cut from a small loaf. Salt at about 1/4 teaspoon per cup, tasted and adjusted.
- The meat chopperA hand-cranked grinder with the fine plate produces a coarse, dry crumb, not a paste. A food processor pulsed briefly does the same; run it continuously and the oils release and you get nut butter, which spreads differently and tastes heavier.
- Black walnutsThese are the native American species, still sold shelled but strongly resinous and quite unlike the English walnut. They dominate a mixture. Use them as a minority of the total unless you know you like them.
- PignoliasPine nuts. They are among the most perishable nuts in the list -- high in oil and prone to rancidity -- so taste one before grinding a cupful.
- The butter is structuralGround nuts have nothing to bind them. The bread must be buttered generously and to the edges or the filling sheds when the sandwich is cut. Softened, not melted.
- ToastingThe recipe does not say whether the nuts are raw or toasted. Ten minutes at 350F on a sheet pan, cooled completely before grinding, deepens the flavor considerably and costs nothing.
- Brown breadHere this most likely means an ordinary whole-wheat or graham loaf rather than the steamed molasses Boston brown bread, though the text does not say. Either works; the wheat loaf suits the black walnuts better.
- HoldingCut nuts stale quickly. Assemble within a few hours, keep the sandwiches under a damp cloth in the refrigerator, and trim crusts just before serving.
Nut sandwiches belong to the era when the tea table and the ladies' luncheon needed something meatless, delicate and cuttable into fingers, and when American food writing was full of enthusiasm for nuts as a protein -- an interest pushed along by vegetarian reformers and by the sanitarium cookery of the same decades that produced commercial peanut butter. The Butterick Publishing Company sold dress patterns and magazines to a middle-class household audience, and its cook book was written for that reader. The offhand closing note that minced peanuts "are also popular" catches the peanut mid-rise, moving from a roadside snack to a pantry staple within a generation. Pecans in particular were entering wide commercial cultivation in the South at just this time.