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Peanut Sandwich No. 3
Chop peanuts fine or put through a coffee mill, salt to taste, and add a little sherry or port wine to make a thick paste. Spread on thin slices of lightly buttered white bread. Put two slices together and garnish with a candied cherry.
A three-ingredient spread that predates the ubiquity of commercial peanut butter, thinned with fortified wine rather than oil. The whole result depends on how finely the nuts are ground.
- Coffee mill vs. food processorA hand coffee mill produced a dry, sandy meal rather than a smooth butter. A food processor gets you there faster but will run past the meal stage into oily paste in about a minute, so pulse and check.
- The peanutsUse roasted, skinned, unsalted peanuts and salt them yourself, as the recipe directs. Salted cocktail peanuts will overwhelm the small quantity of wine.
- "A little sherry or port"Start with a teaspoon per half cup of ground nuts and add drop by drop. Too much and the paste slumps off the bread instead of holding; the wine is there to bind and flavour, not to soak.
- Which sherryA period recipe calling for plain "sherry" more likely meant a medium or cream style than the bone-dry fino sold today. Port gives the sweeter, fruitier result the candied cherry garnish seems to expect.
- Bread and butter"Thin slices of lightly buttered white bread" means a close-crumbed sandwich loaf cut about a quarter inch; the butter is a moisture barrier, so spread it to the edges before the filling goes on.
- The garnishThe recipe says only to garnish the closed sandwich with a candied cherry and does not say how it is fixed; a cocktail pick is the usual modern solution. Trimming the crusts and cutting into fingers or triangles is not specified here, though it is common for tea sandwiches.
- Yield and timingA cup of ground peanuts fills roughly six to eight small tea sandwiches. Make the paste ahead if you like, but assemble within an hour or the bread goes leathery under a cloth.
Eva Greene Fuller's collection appeared in 1909, at the moment when peanuts were shifting from a roasted street snack to a respectable ingredient for the tea table. Commercial peanut butter existed but was still a novelty and often a health-food item, so some cookbooks told the reader to grind her own nuts, and the coffee mill was the household machine best suited to the job. The fortified wine is the giveaway that this belongs to the ladies' luncheon rather than the lunch pail: sherry and port turn up as flavourings in American sandwich fillings of the period, alongside the candied cherry, the stuffed olive and the trimmed crust. Fuller's book runs to several numbered peanut sandwiches, each a small variation on the same idea.