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Grape Fruit Sandwich
Remove the pulp from grape fruit, making one cup; add one-fourth cup of finely chopped walnuts, moisten with a little mayonnaise dressing, and place between thin slices of lightly buttered white bread cut in strips.
A tea sandwich of the fussier sort, and it lives or dies on how dry you get the fruit. Everything else is assembly.
- Drain the pulp hardGrapefruit segments carry a great deal of juice, and a wet filling will turn thin white bread to paste within minutes. Cut the segments free of every scrap of membrane, break them up, and let them sit in a sieve for fifteen or twenty minutes, pressing lightly, before mixing.
- What a cup of pulp meansOne cup of cleaned segments is roughly one large grapefruit, sometimes a little more. Buy two if the fruit is small or heavily pithed.
- Grapefruit has changedThe white-fleshed varieties common around the turn of the century were generally sharper and more bitter than the Ruby Red and Star Ruby types that dominate now, both of which are later introductions. A modern pink grapefruit makes a noticeably sweeter sandwich; a white one is probably closer to what the book intended.
- Toast the walnutsA quarter cup of walnuts, chopped fine. Five minutes in a 350F oven sharpens the flavour and keeps them from tasting damp against the fruit.
- Mayonnaise, sparingly"Moisten" is the operative word — a tablespoon or so, enough to bind. Period mayonnaise was a household egg-yolk emulsion; a good commercial jarred mayonnaise does the same job and is made with pasteurised egg.
- Butter is structuralThe thin film of butter on each slice is a moisture barrier, not a seasoning. Spread it edge to edge on soft, room-temperature butter or the juice will soak straight through.
- Cutting and yieldTrim the crusts, then cut each sandwich into three or four fingers. The quantities given fill about six sandwiches, or eighteen to twenty-four strips — one tea plate's worth. Assemble no more than an hour ahead and keep them covered with a damp cloth.
Grapefruit may still have been something of a novelty when this book was compiled. Florida groves had only been shipping it commercially in quantity since the 1880s and 1890s, and for a while it was a luxury breakfast item served halved with sugar — which is why a cookbook of the period treats it as worth building a sandwich around at all. The sandwich itself belongs to the American tea-table tradition that produced dozens of these little books: crustless white bread, a soft bound filling, cut into strips or fancy shapes, meant for afternoon calls and ladies' luncheons rather than for a meal. The pairing of fruit, nuts and mayonnaise strikes modern palates as odd, but it was thoroughly conventional then — one thinks of Waldorf salad, where mayonnaise dressed something sweet and crisp.