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Date and Nut Sandwich
Between slices of brown bread lightly buttered and cut thin, place this filling; dates stoned and chopped fine, walnut meats chopped fine, moistened with a little sherry wine. Garnish with a spray of smilax.
A tea-table sandwich from the era when a sandwich book could assume brown bread, a decanter of sherry and a florist's delivery. The filling needs almost nothing modernised; the bread and the garnish do.
- ProportionsThe original gives none. Equal weights of pitted dates and walnut meats works, with sherry added a teaspoon at a time until the mass just coheres. Too much wine and it slumps out of the bread.
- Brown breadIn American sandwich books of this period "brown bread" may mean a whole-wheat or graham loaf sliced thin rather than the steamed Boston brown bread. Either will work, but the steamed kind is moist and crumbly and wants a slightly thicker slice.
- Smilax is not foodThe garnish is florist's smilax (Asparagus asparagoides), sold by the yard for table decoration. It is not eaten. Any modern equivalent — a mint sprig, a curl of citrus peel — does the same job, and nothing at all does no harm.
- DatesDeglet Noor slice cleanly and chop without gumming; Medjool are softer, sweeter and will want less sherry to bring together. Check for stray pits regardless of what the package claims.
- Chopping"Chopped fine" matters more than it sounds. Coarse walnut pieces tear thin bread when the sandwich is pressed and cut. A few pulses in a food processor is enough; a paste is too far.
- Sherry substituteOrange juice with a drop of vanilla, or strong brewed tea, moistens the filling as well without alcohol. The sherry is there for aroma and to loosen the dates, not for its own sake.
- Butter as a barrierThe light buttering is functional — it keeps the wine-moistened filling from soaking the crumb. Have the butter properly soft so a thin slice survives spreading.
- Yield and holdingAbout a cup of filling covers eight thin slices, giving four sandwiches, or sixteen fingers with the crusts trimmed. Made an hour ahead and kept under a damp cloth, they improve; overnight, the bread goes heavy.
Date and nut fillings recur in American sandwich books of the 1900s and 1910s, and they belong to the afternoon tea and card-party service rather than to lunch. Dates arrived in quantity from North Africa, and this period also saw the first plantings of date groves in California's Coachella Valley, though it would be some years before they told at the grocer's. The sherry is a small marker of the same table: a sweet sandwich meant for a hostess's tray, not a workman's pail. The instruction to garnish with smilax is the giveaway: it was a florist's staple for draping platters and mantels around the turn of the century, and its appearance in a recipe shows the book is as concerned with how the plate looks as with what is on it.