Peanut Sandwich
Chop roasted and salted peanuts, mix with a little mayonnaise dressing, place between thin slices of lightly buttered entire wheat bread.
A three-line sandwich with almost nothing to go wrong, so the details that matter are texture and proportion.
- Entire wheat bread"Entire wheat" is the period term for whole wheat, milled with the bran and germ retained. Any good whole-wheat sandwich loaf works; the recipe asks only that the slices be thin, so cut them thin.
- Chop, do not grindThe recipe calls for chopped nuts, so the pieces stay distinct rather than becoming a paste; commercial peanut butter was already on sale by this period. Chop by hand or pulse very briefly; a food processor run too long turns the whole thing into paste.
- Proportion"A little" mayonnaise means just enough to bind, roughly one tablespoon to a half cup of chopped nuts. Too much and the filling slides out from between thin slices.
- SaltRoasted salted peanuts plus salted butter plus mayonnaise can push the sandwich over. Taste the filling before spreading and use unsalted butter if the nuts are heavily salted.
- Mayonnaise dressingIn period usage this could mean either a homemade boiled dressing or an emulsified one, often thinner and sharper than jarred mayonnaise. A commercial mayonnaise loosened with a few drops of lemon juice is a reasonable stand-in.
- ButteringThe butter is structural as much as flavoring; it seals thin bread against the moisture in the dressing. Have it soft enough to spread without tearing the slice, and butter to the edges.
- YieldA half cup of chopped peanuts fills about three sandwiches, or a dozen small tea-sized pieces once crusts are trimmed and the sandwiches quartered.
Peanuts moved from a street-vendor snack to a respectable ingredient in American cookbooks between about 1890 and 1910, helped along by sanitarium cookery and by the arrival of commercial peanut butter in the 1890s. Sandwich books of the period are full of nut fillings, and such fillings were often classed separately, under "Nut" rather than with meat or salad fillings, reflecting the era's interest in nuts as a meat substitute for luncheons and vegetarian tables. The pairing with whole-wheat bread is characteristic of the same health-reform current, which regarded white bread as impoverished. Binding chopped nuts with mayonnaise rather than butter or cream is said to have been a practice of the period and gives the filling a savory, salad-like edge quite unlike the sweet peanut butter sandwich that later displaced it.