Grape Sandwich
Remove skins and seeds from one pound of white grapes. Chop grapes, one large apple, and two stalks of celery fine. Mix with a little French dressing and place between thin slices of lightly buttered white bread. Cut sandwiches in strips.
A Waldorf salad in sandwich form, from the era when "French dressing" meant oil and vinegar and nothing else. Two ingredient notes do most of the work here.
- French dressingIn 1909 this means oil and vinegar with salt and pepper, commonly around three or four parts oil to one of vinegar, whisked or shaken to a temporary emulsion. It does not mean the sweet, orange, tomato-based bottled dressing sold under that name in American supermarkets, which would overwhelm the fruit.
- White grapes"White" grapes were green-gold table varieties such as Malaga or muscat, which have thick, tightly adhering skins and large seeds — hence the instruction to peel and seed. Modern seedless green grapes make the step unnecessary; halve or quarter them and skip the peeling entirely.
- QuantitiesA pound of grapes is roughly 2 1/2 to 3 cups whole, which is a great deal of filling against one apple and two celery stalks. Expect enough for six to eight sandwiches, or cut the grapes back if you want the apple and celery to register.
- Drainage is the hingeChopped grapes and apple release a lot of liquid once dressed. Mix, let stand a few minutes, then drain well before filling, or the bread will be soaked through before the plate reaches the table.
- Butter as a barrierThe "lightly buttered" bread is not for flavour so much as waterproofing. Spread it to the very edges of each slice; softened butter, not melted.
- The appleToss the chopped apple in the dressing first so the vinegar keeps it from browning. A firm tart variety holds its texture better than a soft eating apple.
- Cutting in stripsFingers rather than triangles — a common tea-table shape of the period. Trim the crusts first and use a serrated knife with a sawing motion so the filling is not pressed out.
This comes from Eva Greene Fuller's The Up-to-Date Sandwich Book (1909), one of a wave of American books that appeared once afternoon tea entertaining made sandwiches a category worth a volume of their own. The filling is essentially a Waldorf salad — apple, celery and a dressing — a combination generally traced to the Waldorf Hotel in New York in the 1890s and enormously fashionable in the years when this book was compiled. The instruction to skin and seed the grapes dates the recipe: seedless varieties were grown in California by this date, but largely for raisins rather than the table, and a cook working with Malagas or muscats had no choice but to do the tedious work by hand. Cutting the finished sandwiches into strips marks it as a tea or luncheon dish rather than something meant to fill anyone up.