Sandwich No. 2
Chop celery and English walnuts fine, add a dash of salt and allspice, moisten with a little mayonnaise dressing. Spread between thin slices of lightly buttered white bread.
A one-line filling with no quantities, typical of sandwich books of the 1900s, which assumed the cook could judge proportions by eye. A few things need pinning down.
- ProportionsRoughly equal volumes of finely chopped celery and walnuts, about 1/2 cup each, with 3 to 4 tablespoons of mayonnaise, fills four sandwiches. Add the dressing a spoonful at a time; the mixture should hold together, not slump.
- English walnutsThis is simply the common walnut, Juglans regia, as distinguished from the native American black walnut, which is far stronger and would overwhelm the celery. Use ordinary walnut halves and toast them briefly for better flavor.
- AllspiceA dash means a pinch of ground allspice, well under 1/8 teaspoon. It reads oddly to modern palates in a savory filling, though sweet spices do turn up in some period savory mixtures; white pepper is the closer modern instinct if you would rather skip it.
- MayonnaiseBought mayonnaise works and is what most cooks will use. If you make it, many period recipes are looser and more vinegar-forward than the modern jar, so a squeeze of lemon into commercial mayonnaise may bring it nearer the intended taste.
- The breadThin slices, lightly buttered, are not decoration. The butter helps seal the crumb against the dressing, which matters because celery weeps; without it the sandwich goes soggy quickly.
- ServingTrim the crusts and cut into triangles or fingers. Fillings of this kind were used for tea and luncheon sandwiches, and they are best assembled shortly before serving.
Celery and walnut with mayonnaise is the Waldorf salad family without the apple, and it belongs to a brief American vogue, roughly 1890 to 1920, for crisp raw vegetables and nuts bound in cold dressing. Both ingredients had recently become easy to buy: blanched celery was a commercial crop shipped from Michigan and New York by the 1880s, and shelled walnuts arrived cheaply enough to be treated as an everyday larder item rather than a holiday one. Sandwich books like this one multiplied in the same decades, driven by the ladies' luncheon, the church supper and the picnic basket.