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Cheese Sandwich
Steam the brown bread before spreading with butter, and cut in the usual way. Between the slices, place grated American cheese and finely chopped English walnuts well salted. Garnish with an olive.
A short formula that assumes a few things a modern cook will not: that "brown bread" is the steamed Boston kind, and that "American cheese" means a firm domestic cheddar rather than a processed slice.
- American cheeseIn a book of this vintage the phrase means cheese made in America — a firm, sharp factory cheddar — not the processed loaf that later took over the name. Grate a good aged cheddar; a processed slice will not grate and will not carry the salt and walnut.
- Brown breadAlmost certainly Boston brown bread, the molasses-and-rye-and-cornmeal loaf steamed in a mould. The mould is usually cylindrical, so slices come out in discs; a firm whole-wheat or pumpernickel is the closest substitute if you are not making the real thing.
- Steaming the breadBrown bread that has been cooling in the pantry goes dense and slightly dry. Ten minutes over simmering water softens the crumb so it takes butter without tearing. Let it cool enough that the butter does not vanish into it before you spread.
- Butter both slicesNot stated; the recipe says only to spread with butter. Buttering both faces seals the crumb against the moisture in the filling, which matters if the sandwiches are made ahead for a tea table.
- Salting the walnuts"Well salted" is doing real work here — the nuts are flat without it. Salt the chopped walnuts before mixing, taste, and stop short of what feels right, since the cheese is bringing its own.
- English walnutsThe ordinary walnut of the produce aisle. The name distinguished it from the American black walnut, which is stronger and more bitter and would overwhelm the cheese.
- Holding the filling togetherGrated cheese and chopped nuts as written will spill the moment the sandwich is lifted. A little softened butter or cream worked into the mixture binds it without turning it into a spread.
- Yield and servingA tea-table sandwich, cut in halves or quarters. The recipe specifies only that it be garnished with an olive; it does not say where the olive goes.
Steamed brown bread was a New England staple long before it turned up in sandwich books — cheap rye and cornmeal, sweetened with molasses, cooked in a covered mould over water, a method often said to have suited kitchens without ovens. The sandwich craze of the 1890s and 1900s had swept every household ingredient into bread, and the ladies' luncheon and afternoon tea gave American cooks a reason to want fifty variations. Brown bread with cheese and nuts is a characteristic product of that moment: a frugal country loaf recast as a dainty, cut small, garnished with an olive because olives read as elegant on a period tea plate.