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Sandwich (Beat to a cream one)
Beat to a cream one tablespoonful of butter, then add three heaping tablespoonfuls of cream cheese. Mix thoroughly, adding a little sweet cream if necessary to make creamy. Chop a quarter-pound of hickory nuts fine, and blend with the cheese paste; season with salt, pepper, and a little lemon juice. Spread on thin slices of brown bread. Put two slices together and garnish with an olive.
A straightforward tea sandwich whose only real obstacles are the nut and the bread, both of which meant something more specific in 1909 than they do now.
- Hickory nutsShagbark hickory nuts were gathered wild across the eastern and midwestern states and sold in shell by the pound; they are rarely in shops today. Pecans are the closest relative in flavor and the standard substitute, though a good hickory nut is sweeter and more resinous.
- A quarter-pound of nutsProbably shelled weight, though hickory nuts were also sold in the shell, in which case the yield would be considerably smaller. Four ounces of nutmeats is roughly a cup. Either way it is a generous ratio of nut to cheese, and the filling should read as nuts bound by cheese rather than cheese with nuts in it.
- Cream cheese in 1909This was fresh, soft, unstabilized curd cheese, sold in bulk as well as in small foil-wrapped packages, and closer to today's Neufchatel or a farmer cheese than to the firm modern brick. Modern block cream cheese is stiffer, which may be why the recipe allows for thinning with sweet cream.
- Sweet creamSimply fresh unsoured cream, as opposed to the cultured or sour cream also used in period kitchens. Add it a teaspoon at a time; the paste should be spreadable on thin bread without tearing it.
- Brown breadHere brown bread may mean a graham or whole-wheat loaf cut in thin slices, though steamed molasses-and-cornmeal Boston brown bread was also used for sandwiches of this period. Either works; a firm whole-wheat sandwich loaf is the easier one to spread.
- Toasting the nutsThe original assumes raw nutmeats. Ten minutes in a 350F oven, cooled completely before chopping, deepens the flavor considerably and is worth doing with pecans, which are blander than hickory.
- Yield and servingEnough filling for several small sandwiches. Trim the crusts, cut into fingers or triangles, and secure the olive with a pick so the sandwich holds together on the plate.
Eva Greene Fuller's Up-to-Date Sandwich Book belongs to the brief American moment when the sandwich stopped being a workman's lunch and became a category of parlor cookery, with hundreds of variations sorted by filling and served at teas, card parties and luncheons. The nut chapter reflects both fashion and geography: hickory nuts were a genuinely regional American ingredient, gathered from wild shagbark trees in autumn and cracked at home over the winter, and they turn up constantly in Midwestern cookbooks of the period in cakes, candies and salads. Bulk cream cheese had become widely available through commercial dairies in the decades just before, and the combination of soft white cheese, chopped nut and brown bread was one of the standard tea-sandwich formulas of the era. The olive garnish is pure 1900s table manner, the same impulse that put a radish rose on every plate.