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Pecan Sandwich No. 3
Mix one cup of finely chopped pecan nuts with a little chutney. Place between thin slices of buttered white bread.
Two ingredients and no measurements to speak of, so the work is all in the proportions and the texture of the chop.
- How much chutney"A little" means enough to bind the nuts into a spreadable paste without making the bread wet — start with two tablespoons to the cup of pecans and add by the teaspoon. A sweet-sour bottled fruit chutney of the Anglo-Indian type is the likely intention; chop any large fruit pieces small so the filling spreads evenly.
- Chop, do not grindFinely chopped means about the size of coarse breadcrumbs. A food processor will take pecans to oily paste in seconds, so pulse briefly or use a knife.
- Toast the nutsThe recipe does not say whether the pecans are raw or toasted. If you want more flavour, five to seven minutes in a 350F oven, cooled completely, keeps the nuts from tasting dusty against the sweet chutney.
- The butter is structuralButter both slices right to the edges. It seals the crumb against the chutney's moisture and helps the sandwich hold rather than going soggy.
- Thin slicesA tea sandwich of this kind was cut from a close-grained white loaf, as thin as it would slice — a quarter inch or less. Sandwich-cut supermarket bread is close; day-old bread tends to slice thinner and cleaner than fresh.
- Yield and servingOne cup of nuts fills roughly six to eight rounds, crusts trimmed and each cut into quarters or fingers — around two dozen small sandwiches. Assemble no more than an hour or two ahead and keep them under a damp cloth.
Chopped-nut fillings ran through American sandwich books of the early twentieth century, when the sandwich had moved off the workman's lunch pail and onto the tea table and the ladies' luncheon plate. Pecans gave the genre a distinctly American accent — cheap and abundant across the South and increasingly shipped north as commercial orchards spread. The chutney is the other half of the story: bottled Anglo-Indian chutneys were a fixture of the well-stocked pantry by then, a piece of British colonial grocery that Americans seem to have taken up as a shortcut to sweet-sour interest. A recipe like this, numbered as the third variation on pecan, suggests something of how such books could work: a base ingredient run through every plausible partner in turn, with the reader trusted to judge quantities.