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Peanut Sandwich No. 2
Chop a cup of freshly roasted shelled peanuts very fine, mix with three tablespoonfuls of mayonnaise dressing, add salt to taste, and sprinkle upon lightly buttered slices of white bread. Put slices together and cut in tiny squares.
A straightforward chopped-nut spread from the era just before commercial peanut butter was common in every pantry. The only real decision is how finely to chop and how much dressing to add.
- Texture is the whole pointChop by hand or pulse briefly in a food processor to a coarse meal, stopping well short of butter. If the nuts turn oily and pasty the filling smears rather than sits in distinct pieces, which is what distinguishes this from a peanut butter sandwich.
- "Freshly roasted shelled peanuts"Unsalted roasted peanuts, skins rubbed off. Dry-roasted supermarket peanuts work; if they are already salted, taste before adding any salt at all. A cup is roughly 5 oz.
- MayonnaiseMayonnaise at this date was usually made at home and tended to be thicker than most jarred versions; period recipes were sharpened with lemon juice or with vinegar. Three tablespoons of commercial mayonnaise, with a squeeze of lemon if you like, comes close. If you make your own with raw egg, keep the finished sandwiches refrigerated and eat them the same day.
- Butter as well as dressingThe thin film of butter is not redundant. It seals the crumb so the oil from the nuts and the dressing does not soak through, which matters for sandwiches cut small and left on a plate.
- BreadUse a fine-crumbed white sandwich loaf sliced thin. Cut the crusts before assembling, not after, or the filling drags at the edges.
- YieldA cup of nuts fills about four rounds of sandwiches, which cut into roughly two dozen small squares — tea-table portions rather than lunch.
Sandwich books proliferated in the United States in the first decade of the twentieth century, when afternoon teas, card parties and church suppers created steady demand for small, tidy, room-temperature food. Peanuts belong to that moment: cheap, an expanding commercial crop, and moving from a roadside and circus snack into respectable domestic cookery. Ground peanut pastes were being sold commercially from the 1890s, though recipes for chopping one's own nuts and binding them with mayonnaise or cream remained common in print — which is what this recipe does. The instruction to cut the finished sandwich into tiny squares suggests its intended use: not a meal, but one item among many on a tea tray.