Home › Nut › Wich (Between thin slices of lightly)
Wich (Between thin slices of lightly)
Between thin slices of lightly buttered white bread place a crisp lettuce leaf that has been dipped in mayonnaise dressing; on this place slices. of banana and sprinkle with ground peanuts.
A banana-and-peanut sandwich of the sort that filled American lunch baskets before peanut butter was a pantry staple. The whole thing takes three minutes and rewards attention to only a few details.
- The hinge: dress the lettuce, not the breadDipping the leaf in mayonnaise instead of spreading the bread keeps the crumb dry and gives the sandwich its structure. Shake off the excess so the dressing coats rather than pools.
- Ground peanutsSince they are sprinkled, this reads as roasted peanuts ground to a coarse, dryish meal rather than peanut butter. Pulse salted roasted peanuts briefly in a food processor; stop well before they turn to paste.
- Butter both slices"Lightly buttered" here is waterproofing as much as flavour. Softened butter taken to the edges keeps banana moisture out of the bread, which matters if the sandwich is to be carried.
- Banana ripenessUse fruit that is fully yellow but still firm; a spotted, soft banana will slump and weep. Slice it thin, on a slight diagonal, and lay the slices in a single overlapping layer.
- BrowningCut bananas discolour quickly once exposed to air. Assemble at the last moment, or brush the slices with lemon juice.
- The breadThin-sliced soft white sandwich bread is what the original assumes, crusts trimmed if you are being formal. Anything with a chewy or open crumb will tear the lettuce and squeeze the banana out.
- MayonnaiseA period 'mayonnaise dressing' was generally thinner and sharper than modern jarred mayonnaise, closer to a loose dressing. Slackening commercial mayonnaise with a little lemon juice or cream brings it nearer that texture.
- YieldEach sandwich uses roughly half a banana and a tablespoon of ground peanuts; a single banana and one lettuce heart make two rounds, cut into halves or fingers for tea.
Peanuts moved from a street-vendor snack to a respectable ingredient in American home cooking in the years around 1900, helped along by mechanical grinders and by sanitarium cookery, which promoted nuts as a meat substitute. Sandwich books of the period are full of ground-nut combinations, and pairing them with banana made sense once refrigerated steamships had made the fruit cheap and common in northern cities. The lettuce leaf dipped in mayonnaise is a signature of this genre of book: it supplies dressing, crispness and a moisture barrier in one move. The result belongs, at least in part, to the polite luncheon-and-tea tradition, though the same combination survived well into the twentieth century as a children's sandwich made with peanut butter instead of ground nuts.