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Sandwich (One cup of walnut meats)
One cup of walnut meats, chopped fine; add enough cream cheese to make a paste; add salt and a bit of red pepper. Place between lightly buttered white bread cut in fancy shapes.
A two-ingredient spread that depends entirely on the ratio, which the original leaves to your judgement. Start with less cheese than you think you need and stop while the paste still tastes of walnut.
- Walnut meats"Meats" simply means the shelled kernels. One cup is roughly 3.5 to 4 oz, depending on whether they are measured before or after chopping. Toasting them for 8 minutes at 350F is not in the original but it removes the raw, slightly bitter edge that untoasted walnuts bring to a cold spread.
- Cream cheeseIn 1909 this generally meant a fresh, unripened soft cheese, often sold in small foil-wrapped bars, and likely looser and tangier than modern block cream cheese. Today's Philadelphia-style cheese works; let it come fully to room temperature or it will not take the nuts without tearing the bread.
- "Enough to make a paste"Roughly 4 to 6 oz for a cup of nuts. The mixture should hold together when pressed with the back of a spoon but not be spreadable-soft; a splash of cream loosens it if you overshoot on nuts.
- Red pepperCayenne, not paprika and not crushed chilli flakes. "A bit" is about an eighth of a teaspoon for this quantity, enough to register at the back of the palate against the fat of the cheese.
- Chop, do not grindA food processor will turn walnuts to oily paste in seconds. Chop by hand or pulse three or four times so some texture survives, since the nut crunch is the whole point of the sandwich.
- Fancy shapesCut with a small cutter or trim to rounds, diamonds or triangles after filling, using close-grained sandwich bread a day old. The butter on the bread is a moisture barrier, not a flavouring, so keep it thin.
- Yield and holdingEnough for about 12 to 16 small tea sandwiches. Assemble no more than a couple of hours ahead and keep them covered with a damp cloth in the refrigerator; the walnut oil will darken the crumb if they sit overnight.
Nut-and-cream-cheese fillings were a staple of the American afternoon tea and card-party table in the first decades of the twentieth century, when fresh cream cheese had become cheap and widely distributed in small wrapped bars. Eva Greene Fuller's collection, published in 1909, is organised by filling type rather than by occasion, and is full of these one-line formulas that assume a cook who can judge consistency by eye. The instruction to cut the bread "in fancy shapes" places the recipe squarely in the tea-sandwich tradition, where a filling was expected to be mild enough to eat several of and firm enough to survive a stack on a doily-lined plate.