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Chopped dates, 6; butter, 2 teaspoons; orange or lemon juice, few drops (2 sandwiches).
Wash dates and put through chopper. Add a little salt, equal amount or more of peanut butter or cream cheese and a few drops of lemon juice. Mix well. (NOTE. Cooked prune pulp or raisins may replace dates.) Chop dates, add little sweet fruit juice, heat and rub to a smooth paste. Add shredded cocoanut and a few chopped nuts and orange or lemon juice. (Excellent with brown bread.) Jams and jellies.
Ripe bananas mixed with chopped peanuts or peanut butter.
A cluster of sandwich fillings compressed into a single paragraph — this is really three or four separate spreads, plus two one-line suggestions, all aimed at a packed lunch. Read it as a list, not a sequence.
- The headnote does not match the methodThe ingredient line calls for 6 chopped dates, 2 teaspoons butter and a few drops of citrus, yielding 2 sandwiches. The method that follows never mentions the butter, calling instead for "an equal amount or more of peanut butter or cream cheese"; whether that is meant to replace the butter or join it is left unclear.
- Six dates is roughly 2 ouncesSix pitted dates of the ordinary small commercial sort weigh about 2 oz / 55 g and give a scant 1/4 cup of paste — about right for two thinly spread sandwiches.
- "Put through chopper"A hand-cranked food chopper clamped to the table edge. A food processor does this in seconds, but dates gum the blade; pulse rather than run continuously, or chop by hand with an oiled knife.
- Wash the datesNot fussiness. Dates were sold loose from open boxes and arrived dusty and often sticky with sugar bloom. Modern packaged dates need only a check for stray pits.
- The second filling is a cooked one"Chop dates, add little sweet fruit juice, heat and rub to a smooth paste" — a couple of tablespoons of juice in a small pan over low heat, stirring until the fruit collapses, then pressed through a sieve or worked with a spoon. Let it cool completely before adding the coconut and nuts or the bread will go damp.
- CocoanutPeriod recipes mean unsweetened desiccated or freshly shredded coconut. Modern sweetened flaked coconut will push an already sweet filling over the edge; use unsweetened.
- The citrus is structuralA few drops of lemon or orange juice cut the flatness of concentrated date sugar. Do not skip it, and add a pinch of salt even to the versions that do not mention one.
- Banana fillings do not keepRipe banana mashed with peanut butter browns and weeps within a couple of hours. Assemble it last and wrap tightly.
Fruit-and-nut sandwich spreads belong to the early twentieth-century campaign to get a packed lunch to be something more than cold meat between bread. Peanut butter, still a relatively new commercial product in American kitchens at the turn of the century, was promoted heavily as a protein source, and pairing it with dried fruit solved two problems at once: it stuck to the bread and it did not spoil on a schoolroom shelf. The suggestion that these are "excellent with brown bread" is telling — whole-meal and Boston brown bread carried a whiff of nutritional virtue in this period, and lunch-box chapters like this one were written as much for the mother worrying about her children's diet as for the cook. Hence the brisk, advisory tone and the compression of four recipes into one paragraph.