Dream Sandwich
Cold chopped boiled sweetened prunes, mix with English walnuts chopped fine, moisten with a little of the prune syrup, and place between thin slices of lightly buttered white bread. Garnish with a spray of smilax.
A tea-table sandwich that depends almost entirely on how wet the filling is. Everything else is straightforward.
- Moisten with restraintThe prune syrup is the hinge. Add it a teaspoon at a time until the chopped fruit just holds together; any more and it soaks through thin bread within minutes. If you have made the sandwiches ahead and they look damp, they were overmoistened.
- The prunesSold now as dried plums. Simmer about 8 oz in water to cover with 2-3 tablespoons sugar for 20-25 minutes until soft, cool completely, then pit and chop. Cooling matters: warm fruit melts the butter and greys the bread.
- English walnutsThe ordinary tan-shelled walnut of any supermarket (Juglans regia), known in America as 'English' by contrast with the native black walnut, which is far stronger and would overwhelm the prunes. Toasting the nuts briefly is not in the original but keeps them from tasting soft against the fruit.
- Butter both faces"Lightly buttered" is doing structural work here, not seasoning. A thin film of softened butter on each slice seals the crumb against the syrup.
- Bread and cuttingA close-grained white sandwich loaf, sliced thin, crusts trimmed after filling rather than before. Cut into fingers or triangles with a long thin knife wiped between cuts.
- Smilax is decoration onlyFlorists' smilax was the standard trailing green on Edwardian tea trays and is not a food. Lay it on the platter, not on the sandwich, or use a mint sprig or a fresh bay leaf if you want something edible-adjacent.
- YieldThe quantities above fill roughly 8 sandwiches, or about 24 tea-sized fingers. Assemble no more than an hour or two ahead and keep them covered with a damp cloth under plastic wrap.
Sandwich books were a small publishing genre in the first decades of the twentieth century, arriving with the tearoom, the bridge luncheon and the afternoon reception, all of which needed food that could be cut small, held in one hand and made in advance. Fanciful names were part of the format: "dream," "fairy," "surprise" and similar titles turn up in these collections, often attached to fillings of a chopped dried fruit bound with something sweet, though how consistent the pattern was is hard to say. Prunes were an obvious choice, since California's dried-fruit industry had made them cheap, uniform and available year-round, and the cooking syrup came free with the fruit. The spray of smilax is the period's signature: the delicate trailing green was a florist's staple for garnishing platters and trimming tables, and it appears in cookbooks of the era as a garnish.