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Apple and Grape Sandwich
Remove the seeds from thin skinned white grapes; add one apple and one stalk of celery; chop fine.
Moisten with French dressing, toss up, and spread on thinly cut slices of buttered white bread. Place the two slices together.
A salad sandwich of the ladies' luncheon type, built on the apple-and-celery pairing that dominated American cold cookery around 1900. The whole thing turns on keeping the filling dry enough not to soak the bread.
- Drain before you spreadChopped grapes and apple shed a great deal of juice. Toss with the dressing, let the mixture stand five minutes in a sieve, then press lightly and spread. Skipping this gives you a wet, collapsing sandwich within minutes.
- French dressing meant vinaigretteIn this period it is oil and vinegar, commonly somewhere between two and four parts oil to one of vinegar, with salt and pepper and sometimes a little paprika; printed formulas vary. It is not the sweet orange bottled dressing sold under that name in the United States today, which would overwhelm the fruit.
- Thin-skinned white grapesThe original means green table grapes with soft skins and seeds, which had to be halved and picked out. Modern seedless green grapes do the job directly; halve or quarter them rather than chopping to a pulp.
- The applePeel or not as you like, but choose something firm and tart that holds its shape when chopped fine. Toss the apple in the dressing first so the vinegar slows browning.
- Celery'One stalk' is best read here as a single rib rather than a whole head, though period usage of 'stalk' is inconsistent and sometimes means the entire bunch; the proportion to one apple points to a rib. String it with a peeler if it is coarse, and chop it finer than the fruit so it reads as texture rather than as a mouthful of celery.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield and no grape quantity; one apple, one rib of celery and a small bunch of grapes should fill roughly three or four sandwiches, cut in halves or fingers for a tea plate. Assemble close to serving.
Eva Greene Fuller's sandwich book belongs to a brief, intense American vogue: between roughly 1900 and 1920 publishers issued whole volumes on nothing but sandwiches, driven by the rise of the afternoon tea, the club luncheon and the packed office meal. The apple-celery-grape combination here is essentially the filling of a Waldorf salad, generally traced to the Waldorf Hotel in New York in the mid-1890s and to its maitre d'hotel Oscar Tschirky, though Tschirky's version used mayonnaise and no grapes; the grapes and the vinaigrette are later liberties that the sandwich books took freely. Dressing fruit with oil and vinegar rather than sugar was itself a mark of the fashionable salad course, and putting that salad between thin buttered slices of white bread was exactly the sort of dainty, knife-and-fork-free food these books existed to supply.