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Halloween Sandwich
One cup of celery, one orange cut fine, one-half cup of raisins seeded and halved; add one-half cup of grated apple to one-half cup of mayonnaise and mix with this; place between thin slices of lightly buttered white or whole wheat bread. Garnish with a spray of smilax.
A Waldorf salad in sandwich form, from the era when mayonnaise-bound fruit fillings counted as a sweet course. The measurements are straightforward; the handling is what decides whether it holds together.
- Drain everything firstThe orange and grated apple both release a lot of juice, and mayonnaise will not hold it. Cut the orange over a sieve, let the segments and the grated apple drain a few minutes, and press out excess before mixing, or the bread turns to paste within the hour.
- Cup measures here are prepared volumesCup measures here are most likely prepared volumes -- one cup of celery meaning celery already cut fine, roughly two large ribs. 'One orange cut fine' is not further specified; it is usually taken to mean the peeled flesh chopped small rather than slices.
- Grate the apple lastGrated apple browns within minutes. Grate it directly into the mayonnaise so the coating slows oxidation, and use a firm tart apple that will not collapse.
- Mayonnaise proportionHalf a cup for this quantity of filling is generous by modern taste and quite sweet-savoury; a third of a cup binds it perfectly well. Mayonnaise at the time would often have been made at home, and a squeeze of lemon may bring a jarred one closer to the intended balance.
- Smilax is decoration, not foodSmilax was the standard florist's trailing green of the 1900s, laid across platters and table linen. It is a garnish for the plate only; skip it or use a sprig of mint or a celery leaf.
- Bread and assemblyThin-sliced white or whole wheat, buttered right to the edges: the butter is the moisture barrier and should not be treated as optional. Assemble no more than an hour before serving and keep the sandwiches covered and chilled.
- YieldRoughly three cups of filling by the recipe's own quantities, enough for a good number of full sandwiches or considerably more small tea sandwiches with the crusts cut away.
This comes from Eva Greene Fuller's The Up-to-Date Sandwich Book (1909), published at the height of an American enthusiasm for the sandwich as a ladies' luncheon and tea food rather than laborer's fare — hence the whole section of sweet fillings bound with mayonnaise, which strikes modern readers as odd but was then simply the standard salad dressing. The filling is essentially a Waldorf salad, the apple-celery-mayonnaise combination generally traced to the Waldorf Hotel in New York in the mid-1890s, with orange and raisins added and the whole thing put between bread. The Halloween name probably reflects the seasonal logic of the period's entertaining manuals: the holiday fell at apple and nut harvest, and one imagines hostesses' guides drawing apples, raisins and orange toward autumn party menus, though this is speculation rather than documented practice. Smilax, called for as a garnish, was so common in Edwardian table decoration that a cookbook could name it without explanation.