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Nut and Fruit Sandwich
Mash half-pound of pitted prunes, mix them with a half-pound of seedless raisins, half-pound of stoned dates, and the same quantity of washed figs, quarter of a pound of blanched almonds, a quarter of a pound of peeled Brazil nuts, and one pound of pecans. Put through the meat chopper, add the juice of two oranges and knead the mixture with your hands; pack it down into baking powder boxes or into any round tin and stand it aside in a cold place; when wanted for use, remove from the tins, cut thin, and place slices between lightly buttered white bread cut round. Garnish top with a maraschino cherry.
This is a fruit-and-nut confection, chilled into a log and sliced like a sausage. The whole batch is enormous by modern standards, and the paste, not the sandwich, is the project.
- Scale and yieldThe fruit and nuts together come to about three and a half pounds, which fills two or three cylinders and will make several dozen small round sandwiches. Halving or quartering the batch is sensible unless you are feeding a party.
- The meat chopperA hand-cranked grinder with the coarse plate; a food processor works but tends to pulverise rather than chop, so pulse and stop while the nuts are still in pieces. Grind the sticky fruit and the nuts alternately so the fruit does not pack the plate.
- "Washed figs"Dried figs, rinsed to remove the sugar bloom and packing dust, then patted dry. Cut off the hard stem nubs first, as they will not break down in the grinder.
- Brazil nuts and almonds"Peeled" Brazil nuts means shelled with the papery skin off; buying them already shelled is fine. Blanched almonds are skinned almonds, sold that way at any supermarket.
- Baking powder boxesRound tins about two and a half inches across and four or five inches tall, which is what gives the neat circular slice. A wide-mouthed jar, a clean can, or plastic wrap rolled into a firm cylinder does the same job.
- Chilling"A cold place" means the refrigerator, and it needs several hours at least, preferably overnight. A soft paste tears instead of slicing.
- SlicingUse a thin sharp knife wiped between cuts, or dipped in hot water. The recipe says only to cut thin; around an eighth of an inch suits the bread rounds, as thicker slices overwhelm them.
- The breadCut rounds with a cutter matched to the diameter of your tin, and butter lightly rather than thickly "the paste is already rich. Assemble shortly before serving, as the orange juice in the filling will soften the bread over a few hours.
- KeepingWrapped tightly and refrigerated, the paste log should keep for a week or two; the low moisture and high sugar of the dried fruit help it along.
This belongs to the era when the hand-cranked meat chopper was becoming a common household fixture and cookbook writers were finding uses for it well beyond meat " nut butters, fruit pastes, minced sandwich fillings of every kind. The chilled, sliceable fruit-and-nut log is essentially a confection of the same family as the sugarplum and the fig-and-date roll, borrowed here for the tea table. Sandwich books proliferated in the first decades of the twentieth century because the afternoon tea and the ladies' luncheon demanded small, uniform, decorative food; the round bread and the single maraschino cherry on top are pure period styling, of a piece with the tinted aspics and piped butter roses that filled the same volumes.