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Tomato and Nut Sandwich
Chop three medium sized tomatoes, add one small green pepper chopped fine, and a half-cup of chopped walnuts; add a dash of mayonnaise dressing and place on a lettuce leaf between thin slices of white bread cut in squares.
A raw filling that lives or dies on moisture control: chopped tomato weeps immediately, and the bread has no defense. Everything else here is straightforward.
- Drain the tomatoes firstSeed and chop the tomatoes, then let them sit in a strainer with a pinch of salt for 15 minutes and discard the liquid. Mixed and spread straight away, this filling will soak through thin white bread in minutes.
- QuantitiesThree medium tomatoes is roughly 1 lb; a half-cup of chopped walnuts is about 2 oz. Together with the pepper this fills four to six square sandwiches, depending on how thickly you spread.
- "A dash of mayonnaise"Enough to bind, not to sauce -- about a tablespoon or two. The dressing is here as glue for the nuts, and more of it only adds liquid to a filling that already has too much.
- Toast the walnutsTen minutes in a 350F oven, cooled and then chopped, gives a firmer nut that does not go soft against the wet tomato. Not in the original, but it is the single change that most improves the result.
- Green pepperAn ordinary green bell pepper, chopped very fine. Remove the ribs, which are the most bitter part.
- Bread and assemblyThin-sliced white sandwich bread, crusts off, cut into squares after filling. Build these no more than half an hour before serving; buttering the bread to the edges slows the seepage.
This comes from The Up-to-Date Sandwich Book, a 1909 collection by Eva Greene Fuller that ran to hundreds of numbered variations grouped by their principal ingredient -- a book aimed squarely at the luncheon, the card party and the picnic hamper rather than the family dinner. Sandwiches of this kind mark the moment when the sandwich stopped meaning cold meat between bread and became a vehicle for anything a hostess could chop: nuts, peppers, olives, cheese, dates. The tomato-and-nut combination belongs to a wave of vegetarian and "nut food" cookery promoted in the same years by health reformers and sanitarium kitchens, where walnuts supplied the richness that meat otherwise would. Mayonnaise, still generally made at home in 1909, is what holds the whole loose mixture together.