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Hickory Nut Sandwich
Mix together chopped hickory nuts and pot cheese, add a dash of paprika, and place between thin slices of either white or brown bread lightly buttered. Garnish with an olive.
A two-ingredient spread that lives or dies on the cheese. Get the proportions and the moisture right and the rest is assembly.
- Pot cheesePot cheese is a fresh, unripened curd cheese, drier and coarser than cottage cheese and unsalted or barely salted. Dry-curd cottage cheese or farmer's cheese is the closest supermarket equivalent; if using regular cottage cheese, drain it in a sieve for half an hour or the bread will go soggy.
- ProportionsThe original gives none. About one part chopped nuts to two parts cheese by volume holds together and still tastes of nut; mash the cheese smooth with a fork first, then fold the nuts in.
- Hickory nutsShagbark hickory is the usual kind and is rarely sold shelled — it is a foraged nut with a hard, chambered shell. Pecans are the same genus and the standard substitute, with a milder flavour; toasting them briefly sharpens it.
- SeasoningPot cheese is bland by design, so the mixture needs salt as well as the paprika. Taste before spreading. Paprika in an American kitchen of this era would generally have been the mild, sweet sort rather than smoked or hot.
- The breadThe original does not specify a thickness; slices of about a quarter inch from a sandwich loaf suit it. The butter is a moisture barrier as much as a flavouring, so spread it to the edges.
- Yield and servingA cup of the mixture fills roughly six rounds, cut into quarters or fingers for a tea plate. Best made no more than an hour ahead and kept covered with a damp cloth.
Hickory nuts were one of the few genuinely native American nuts in wide domestic use, gathered rather than farmed and shelled at home — laborious enough that recipes tend to treat a cupful as something worth stretching with cheese or butter. Pot cheese belongs to the same economy: the dry curd left after skimming and souring milk, often made in the kitchen rather than bought. Sandwich books proliferated in America in the first decades of the twentieth century, when afternoon tea, card parties and the packed lunch all wanted small, tidy, cold food, and such books commonly carry chapters of nut fillings. Olives were a stock garnish in sandwich books of the period.