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Dainty Cheese Sandwich
A dainty cheese sandwich to serve at afternoon parties is made by placing the halves of an English walnut on either side of a square of cream cheese.
Serve on a crisp lettuce leaf.
A two-line assembly rather than a cooked dish, but the proportions matter: the walnut halves are the bread, so everything hinges on their size and freshness.
- "English walnut"The ordinary walnut of the supermarket, Juglans regia, as distinct from the native American black walnut the book's readers also knew. Use large, unbroken halves and taste one first — walnuts go rancid quickly, and a stale half ruins the whole thing.
- Cream cheese in 1909Then a fresh, soft, unripened cheese sold in small foil-wrapped squares, closer to today's Neufchâtel than to the gum-stabilised blocks now common. Modern block cream cheese works if you let it come to room temperature enough to cut cleanly but not so much that it slumps.
- "A square of cream cheese"No dimension is given. Cut cubes roughly the footprint of your walnut halves — about half an inch square and a quarter-inch thick is right for a nut that size; anything thicker overwhelms the nut.
- Season itThe original says nothing about seasoning. Fresh cream cheese is bland on its own, so a little salt, and white pepper or a scrape of lemon zest, keeps this from tasting of nothing but fat.
- Toasting the nutsNot in the original, and not required, but five to seven minutes in a 350F oven, cooled completely, deepens the flavour and firms the halves so they hold without crumbling.
- Yield and timingReckon three to four per person as one item on a tea plate. Assemble within an hour of serving — held longer, the cheese weeps and the nuts soften against it.
- The lettuce leafStructural as well as decorative: a cupped inner leaf of iceberg or butter lettuce, chilled and dried thoroughly, keeps the pieces from sliding on the plate.
Eva Greene Fuller's Up-to-Date Sandwich Book (1909) belongs to the moment when the sandwich stopped being a workman's lunch and became a fixture of the afternoon party, the bridge table and the church social — the book runs to some four hundred variations, the great majority of them on bread, with a small novelty category, like this one, that dispenses with the loaf entirely. Calling two walnut halves with cheese between them a sandwich tells you how loosely the word was used: what defined the form was the filling between two like things, not the loaf. Cream cheese made these possible on a domestic scale; American factory-made fresh cheese in small wrapped squares is generally traced to the 1880s, and it gave hostesses a soft, mild, uniform spread that needed no cooking and no skill. The result is characteristic of Edwardian entertaining — small, pale, quick to assemble in quantity, and meant to be eaten with the fingers while standing up.