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Cream Cheese and Nut Sandwich
Chop English walnuts fine, mix with cream cheese and a little chopped celery; add a dash of mayonnaise dressing. Place the mixture between thin slices of lightly buttered white bread. Garnish with a sprig of watercress.
A tea-table sandwich with no quantities given, which is normal for the genre; the proportions are left to the maker. A few notes on what the terms meant and where the balance sits.
- Working proportionsFor four sandwiches, about 4 oz cream cheese to 1/3 cup finely chopped walnuts and 2 tablespoons minced celery, with a teaspoon or so of mayonnaise. The mayonnaise is there to loosen the cheese, not to flavor it; add it a little at a time until the mixture spreads without tearing bread.
- English walnutsThe period name for the common Persian walnut, specified to distinguish it from the black walnut, which was far more available in American yards and is aggressively resinous. Use ordinary supermarket walnuts. Toasting them briefly and cooling them fully before chopping improves the flavor and keeps them from going soft in the cheese.
- Cream cheese in 1909Commercial Philadelphia-style cheese was on the market by this date, but so was fresh unripened farm cheese sold under the same name, which was wetter and tangier. Modern block cream cheese is stiffer than either; let it come to room temperature before mixing or you will shred the bread.
- The celeryUse the pale inner ribs and mince them fine. Outer stalks are stringy and release water, which will make the filling weep by the time it reaches the table.
- Butter the bread, and mean itButter the bread -- The light buttering helps these sandwiches hold up on a plate, sealing the crumb against the moisture in the cheese and celery. Soft butter, spread edge to edge.
- BreadA close-grained white sandwich loaf, sliced thin. If you are cutting the crusts off and quartering, as was common for tea sandwiches of the period, chill the finished sandwich for ten minutes before cutting for clean edges.
- MayonnaiseHomemade mayonnaise of the era was raw-yolk and made fresh. Commercial jarred mayonnaise, made with pasteurized egg, is the practical substitute and behaves the same way here.
- Yield and timingThe quantities above make roughly four full sandwiches, or sixteen quarters. Best assembled within an hour or two of serving and kept covered with a damp cloth; the filling itself can be mixed a day ahead.
Eva Greene Fuller's collection appeared in 1909, during what is often described as the American sandwich craze that followed the spread of the afternoon tea and the ladies' luncheon into middle-class households. Cream cheese was the workhorse of that moment: cheap, mild, endlessly extensible, and able to bind almost anything chopped fine, which is why the cheese section of a book like this runs to page after page of near-variations. The nut-and-celery pairing was among the most durable of them, and the same combination shows up in the salads and "nut loaves" of the period, when walnuts were being promoted heavily as a genteel protein by vegetarian and health-reform cookery writers. The watercress sprig is not a flavoring but a plating convention of the era, in the same spirit as the parsley that is said to have garnished nearly everything sent to table around the turn of the century.