Home › Nut › Black Walnut Sandwich
Black Walnut Sandwich
Between thin slices of lightly buttered brown bread spread black walnut meats chopped rather fine. Nice to serve with hot chocolate.
A three-line sandwich that depends entirely on the quality of two ingredients. The only real decisions are the bread and how you treat the nuts.
- Black walnuts are not English walnutsJuglans nigra has a strong, resinous, almost gamey flavor and a much harder shell; it is not interchangeable with the supermarket walnut. Sold shelled in pieces, usually in the baking aisle or from regional suppliers, and worth seeking out here since the whole sandwich is built on that flavor.
- Toast the nuts firstThe recipe says nothing about the state of the nuts, and in its day they would likely have been cracked at home. Packaged black walnut pieces have often sat in warm storage and go rancid quickly because of their high oil content. Taste before using, and warm them in a dry pan or a 325F oven for 5 to 7 minutes to sharpen the flavor; cool completely before chopping so the butter does not melt.
- "Brown bread" in 1909"Brown bread" -- In a book of this period this most likely means a whole-wheat or graham loaf rather than the steamed Boston brown bread of the baked-bean table, though a firm steamed brown bread also works. Whatever you use should slice thin without tearing, so a day-old close-grained loaf is better than a soft modern sandwich bread.
- The butter is structuralChopped nuts have nothing to bind them. Butter at true room temperature, spread right to the edges, is what holds the filling in place. Cold butter tears thin brown bread and leaves bare patches the nuts fall out of.
- Chop, do not grind"Rather fine" means about the size of coarse sand, fine enough to sit flat but still with some texture. A food processor turns black walnuts to oily paste in seconds; a knife on a board gives better control.
- A pinch of saltThe recipe says only "lightly buttered" and does not mention salt. If you use unsalted butter, add a little flaky salt to the nut mixture or the sandwich tastes flat.
- Yield and servingFigure about 1/2 cup of chopped nuts and 3 tablespoons of butter for four small sandwiches. Cut into fingers or triangles, crusts off if serving with the hot chocolate the book suggests.
Black walnuts were a gathered food rather than a bought one across much of the eastern and midwestern United States, and a household with a tree in the yard had bushels of them each autumn to crack through the winter. The sandwich itself belongs to the era's afternoon-tea and "tea room" fashion, when the sandwich was reinvented as a small, sweet-leaning, sit-down food rather than a laborer's lunch, and collections of this kind ran to page after page of nut, fruit and cheese fillings on thin crustless bread. Black walnut has a strong, slightly tannic bite that holds its own against chocolate in a way the milder English walnut does not.