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Dainty Peanut Sandwich
One cup of sugar and enough water to cover; boil until it threads from spoon; stir this into the white of an egg beaten stiff. Add one cup of peanuts ground fine; spread the paste on salted wafers; let stand a while before serving.
This is boiled-icing technique applied to a cracker: hot sugar syrup beaten into egg white, loaded with ground peanuts. The syrup stage is the whole recipe.
- "Threads from spoon"Thread stage, in the region of 225-235F on a candy thermometer, where the syrup falls from the spoon in a fine thread rather than drops. One cup of sugar with just enough water to cover it will reach this after several minutes of hard boiling, depending on how much water was used; do not stir once it is clear.
- Adding the syrupPour it into the stiff white in a slow steady stream at the edge of the bowl while beating continuously. Dumped in at once it cooks the white into threads and the paste turns grainy.
- Egg safetyThread-stage syrup warms the white but does not reliably pasteurize it, and nothing here is cooked afterward. Use pasteurized whites or powdered egg white if the sandwiches are for children, the elderly or anyone pregnant.
- Salted wafersNot modern ice-cream wafers. These are thin plain salted crackers of the water-biscuit or soda-cracker type; a plain saltine or an unseasoned water cracker is the right substitute. The salt against the sweet frosting is the point of the dish.
- The peanutsRoasted unsalted peanuts, skins rubbed off, pulsed in a food processor until fine but not oily. Salted cocktail peanuts will overwhelm the salted cracker.
- Letting them standTwenty to thirty minutes uncovered lets the frosting firm to a marshmallow set and the cracker soften slightly. Longer than an hour or two and the wafers go limp, so assemble close to serving.
- YieldA cup of sugar and one white makes enough paste for roughly two dozen wafers spread open-faced, or a dozen closed sandwiches.
Eva Greene Fuller's The Up-to-Date Sandwich Book (1909) belongs to the moment when the sandwich stopped being a cold cut between bread and became a whole category of party food, including a sweet division that modern readers find odd. Peanuts were the fashionable novelty of the period: cheap, newly available shelled and roasted in quantity, and just then being ground into the paste that would become commercial peanut butter. Recipes of this era are sometimes found pairing them with boiled icing, the same egg-white-and-syrup mixture used for cake frosting and for divinity candy, a sweet whose printed recipes are generally traced to the decade or so after 1900. Serving that paste on a salted cracker rather than bread reflects the afternoon-tea table, where sandwiches were meant to be small, dry enough to hold, and eaten standing up.