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Chestnut and Prune Sandwich
Boil chestnuts twenty minutes; peel and chop fine, add an equal amount of cooked prunes chopped; moisten with a little cream and place between thin slices of lightly buttered whole wheat bread. Garnish top with a maraschino cherry.
A tea-table spread rather than a lunch sandwich: two soft, sweet purees bound with cream. The work is all in the chestnuts.
- Score the chestnuts firstCut an X through the shell of each nut before boiling, or the shells split unpredictably and the peeling takes twice as long. Twenty minutes at a rolling boil is right, but lift them out a few at a time and peel while hot — both the outer shell and the bitter brown inner skin come away only while the nut is steaming.
- Shortcut worth takingVacuum-packed or jarred cooked chestnuts stand in for nuts in the shell and need no boiling; allow noticeably more weight in the shell than you want peeled, since shells and skins account for roughly a quarter of it. Canned chestnut puree is too loose and often already sweetened.
- "Cooked prunes"Dried pitted prunes simmered in water until plump and tender, 15-20 minutes, then drained well. Prunes straight from the bag are moist enough to chop but will not give the jammy texture the filling depends on. Drain them thoroughly or the bread turns to paste.
- Equal amounts, by volumeEqual amounts -- 'An equal amount' is ambiguous; equal volumes of the two chopped mixtures is the likelier reading, and the difference matters little here. Chop both fine enough to spread — a food processor pulsed a few times is fine, but stop short of a smooth puree.
- How much creamA tablespoon or two at most, added a little at a time. The filling should just hold together when pressed; any wetter and it soaks the bread within the hour.
- Bread and assemblyThin-sliced whole wheat, butter to the edges to seal it against the moist filling, and trim the crusts if you are serving these at tea. Assemble no more than an hour or two ahead.
- The cherry means open-facedThe cherry and the closed sandwich -- The recipe says 'between thin slices,' so it is a closed sandwich, yet a cherry perched on top will not stay on one. Cutting into small rounds or triangles and topping each piece with a cherry is one way to reconcile the two, and suits them to a tea table rather than a lunch box.
- YieldThe original gives no quantities, so scale to the number of sandwiches you want: roughly a cup of filling will cover 6 to 8 closed sandwiches, or about 20 small tea-sized pieces.
Sandwich books were a small publishing genre in the first decades of the twentieth century, when the afternoon tea table and the ladies' luncheon created steady demand for fillings that were dainty, sliceable and not meat. Sweet sandwiches often occupied a chapter of their own, and prunes turn up constantly — cheap, shelf-stable, heavily promoted by California growers after the 1890s, and reliably sweet without sugar. Chestnuts had a different standing then than now: the American chestnut was still a common tree, and the blight that reached New York in 1904 had not yet finished destroying it, so chestnuts in bulk were an ordinary autumn purchase rather than a specialty item. The maraschino cherry on top marks the period as clearly as anything, being the standard finishing flourish of American tea-room cookery in the years when domestically produced brined and dyed cherries gradually displaced the original Italian liqueur-preserved fruit, a shift that ran through the 1910s and 1920s.