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Wich (Heat a tablespoonful of butter)
Heat a tablespoonful of butter in a pan and add the juice of a lemon. Season with salt and pepper.
To this gradually add a well beaten egg, thinned with sour cream, adding it slowly, stirring the while to prevent it from curdling. When it begins to thicken, remove and stir in enough ground peanuts to make a good spreading butter. In preparing sandwiches of this, cut bread thin, spread with the mayonnaise; and lay between the slices a crisp lettuce leaf. Cut the sandwiches in fancy shapes. Dainty for noon-day luncheon.
A cooked egg dressing turned into a peanut spread — closer to an old-fashioned boiled dressing than to true mayonnaise. Everything depends on keeping the heat low.
- The hinge: gentle heatThe egg-and-cream mixture will scramble the moment the pan gets properly hot. Work over low heat, or set the pan in simmering water, and add the egg in a thin stream while stirring constantly. Pull it off the heat as soon as it coats the spoon.
- Cook the egg throughThe dressing is safe once the egg reaches about 160F, which is roughly the point at which it thickens. If it thickens before it has had any real heat, it has curdled rather than cooked; start again.
- "Mayonnaise" in 1900"Mayonnaise" loosely used -- In this period the word was often applied to egg-based dressings, cooked as well as raw. Nothing here is emulsified in the modern sense — there is no oil beaten in drop by drop.
- Sour creamPeriod sour cream was naturally soured, thin and tangy. Modern cultured sour cream is much thicker; loosen it with a spoonful of milk or buttermilk before adding, or the egg will not thin properly.
- Ground peanutsCommercial peanut butter existed but was not universal, and this recipe assumes nuts ground at home. Unsweetened natural peanut butter, stirred, is the closest substitute — avoid the sweetened stabilised kind, which fights the lemon and salt.
- QuantitiesThe original gives no amount of cream or peanuts. Something like 2 tablespoons of sour cream to one egg is a reasonable starting point; work in peanuts a spoonful at a time until it spreads without tearing bread. This should make roughly six to eight thin sandwiches.
- "Fancy shapes"Cut into triangles, fingers or rounds with a cutter; crusts are usually trimmed for this sort of sandwich, though the recipe does not say so. Assemble shortly before serving — the lettuce wilts and the dressing soaks into thin bread quite quickly.
- KeepingAn egg and cream spread with no preservative beyond lemon juice. Refrigerate and use within a day or two.
This comes from a period when the peanut was moving briskly from street food to genteel luncheon fare. Ground peanut pastes were promoted through the 1890s by health reformers and sanitarium kitchens — the Battle Creek circle around John Harvey Kellogg is usually credited with popularising the idea in America — and by the 1900s a number of cookbooks carried a "nut" chapter alongside the ham and the chicken. The sandwich itself belongs to the ladies' luncheon: thin bread, crusts off, cut in shapes, a leaf of lettuce for crispness, and the whole thing described as "dainty," which in this literature is high praise. The cooked egg dressing rather than a whipped oil mayonnaise is characteristic of home boiled dressings, which used less oil, held up better in a warm pantry, and were less likely to break than an emulsion beaten by hand.