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Peanut Sandwich No. 4
Cut white bread in rounds with the biscuit cutter, cover with whipped cream slightly sweetened. Sprinkle chopped peanuts over the cream. Cover with another round of bread and serve as soon as made.
A closed tea sandwich built on whipped cream rather than butter, which dictates everything about how it is handled. Nothing here is difficult, but the assembly is unforgiving of delay.
- Serve as soon as made — and mean itWhipped cream soaks into bread within minutes and the round collapses into a wet disc. Cut, fill and plate in one motion, or hold the cut bread under a damp towel and fill only as the plates go out.
- Biscuit cutterA round cutter of about 2 to 2½ inches, the size used for baking-powder biscuits. Cut from thinly sliced sandwich bread; two rounds per slice is typical, and the trimmings are the cook's.
- White breadA close-grained, mild loaf is wanted, not an open-crumbed artisan bread whose holes let the cream through. Day-old bread cuts cleaner rounds than fresh.
- Slightly sweetened creamRoughly a teaspoon of sugar to a cup of heavy cream, whipped to firm peaks rather than soft — soft cream will run at the edges. A cup of cream fills far more sandwiches than one sitting needs; a half cup is plenty for a dozen.
- The peanutsRoasted peanuts, shelled and skinned, chopped fine by hand or in a nut mill, are what a recipe of this kind would have meant. Salted cocktail peanuts work and the salt is welcome against the sweet cream; chop them coarsely enough to keep some crunch.
- YieldA single loaf's worth of rounds gives roughly 18 to 24 finished sandwiches, which suits a tea table. The original gives no number at all.
- Allergy noteThe original offers no comment on peanuts as an allergen. At any modern gathering these need to be labelled and kept separate from other trays.
This comes from a run of peanut sandwiches in an American sandwich book of the early 1900s, a period when the peanut was moving from a street-vendor snack towards respectability as a tea-table ingredient. Commercial peanut butter had reached the market only a little earlier and grinding one's own nuts was still ordinary kitchen work, so recipe writers offered peanuts chopped, ground, pounded to paste and, as here, simply scattered. The whipped cream filling belongs to the same fashion: sandwich books of the period carry many fillings bound with cream, cream cheese or mayonnaise instead of butter, intended for small rounds eaten soon after making rather than anything packed or carried. The instruction to serve at once points the same way.