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Dyspeptic Sandwich
Spread thin slices of gluten bread with peanut butter, mixed with crisp brown bread crumbs, put the two slices together, and cut in strips.
A three-ingredient invalid sandwich from the era when "dyspepsia" was a household diagnosis. The original gives no quantities, so the balance is left to the cook.
- Gluten breadA commercial health-food product of the period: flour with much of the starch washed out, leaving a dense, high-protein loaf sold for diabetics and dyspeptics. Nothing on a modern shelf matches it; a firm sprouted-grain or dense wholemeal loaf, sliced thin, is the nearest practical stand-in. Note that it is emphatically not gluten-free bread, which is the opposite thing.
- Peanut butter, then and nowPeriod peanut butter was typically ground roasted peanuts and salt, loose and oily; hydrogenated, stabilised butter came later. Old-style stir-in natural peanut butter gives the looseness needed to absorb the crumbs; a stabilised commercial jar will make a stiffer paste.
- Brown bread crumbsCrumbs from a dark loaf, dried and crisped until they snap, then rolled or sieved fine. The recipe gives no method for crisping them. They are there for texture, not bulk, and they will soften once mixed into the butter.
- ProportionThe original gives none. As a starting point, a small quantity of crumbs to a larger quantity of peanut butter gives noticeable crunch without turning the spread crumbly and hard to spread. Work the crumbs in at the last moment.
- Cutting in stripsSandwich fingers, cut narrow, were a common form for a tea tray or a sickroom plate. Trim the crusts first if the gluten loaf has a hard edge; the strips cut cleanly with a serrated knife wiped between cuts.
- YieldTwo slices make four to six fingers, one serving. Scale by the loaf; the mixture keeps a day covered, though the crumbs will have softened.
"Dyspepsia" covered everything from heartburn to chronic indigestion in the late nineteenth century, and it supported a whole industry of special foods. Gluten bread came out of European dietetic medicine, where washing the starch from wheat flour was the standard way to make bread for diabetics, and by 1900 it was sold ready-baked in American cities. Peanut butter arrived from the same quarter rather than from confectionery: it is generally traced to the sanitarium kitchens of the 1890s, where ground nuts were promoted as protein that required no chewing and no meat. This sandwich is a reminder that a sandwich in this period was as often a nurse's provision as a picnic item — soft, small, cut into fingers, and built from foods associated with invalid cookery.