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Wich (Mix with one roll)
Mix with one roll of Neufchatel cheese, half a cupful of chopped almonds or butternuts; spread on thin slices of lightly buttered graham or Boston brown bread. Garnish with a small pickle.
A spreadable cheese sandwich from the era when soft cheese came wrapped in foil rolls rather than in bricks or tubs. Two of the three main ingredients need translating before you shop.
- "One roll" of NeufchatelAmerican Neufchâtel was sold in small foil-wrapped rolls, commonly about 3 ounces at the time. That is roughly 6 tablespoons — a modern 8-ounce brick will make between two and three batches. Today's Neufchâtel is essentially a lower-fat cream cheese and works directly; French Neufchâtel from a cheese counter is a bloomy-rind cheese and behaves quite differently.
- ButternutsButternut is Juglans cinerea, the white walnut — sweeter and oilier than a black walnut. Butternut canker has made the tree scarce and the nuts are hard to buy; English walnuts are the usual stand-in, and the almonds the recipe offers first are the easier choice.
- Toast the nutsHalf a cupful of chopped nuts against 3 ounces of soft cheese is a high proportion, so their flavour carries the sandwich. Ten minutes in a 350F oven, cooled before chopping, is the difference between this and a bland spread.
- Boston brown breadA steamed loaf of rye, cornmeal and wheat sweetened with molasses, traditionally cooked in a cylindrical tin. The canned version still sold slices into neat rounds, which is what the "thin slices" assumes. Graham bread is a whole-wheat loaf made with coarsely milled flour.
- Butter under the cheese"Lightly buttered" is not decoration. Both breads are moist, the brown bread molasses-sweet, and a thin film of butter keeps the cheese from soaking in and going pasty.
- Softening and spreadingBring the cheese to room temperature and beat it smooth before folding in the nuts, or the chopped pieces will tear the soft bread. A pinch of salt helps; the modern low-fat product is blander than the original.
- YieldOne roll of cheese plus the nuts fills about four sandwiches cut from small brown-bread rounds, or two ordinary slices of graham bread cut in halves.
Eva Greene Fuller's sandwich book belongs to a brief American vogue, roughly 1900 to 1915, for the sandwich as a ladies'-luncheon and afternoon-tea item rather than working food — hence the thin bread, the soft cheese and the pickle set alongside as garnish. Neufchâtel — the name is borrowed from the Normandy cheese, but the American product, made in and around Chester, in Orange County, New York, from the 1870s onward, was a fresh unripened cheese sold in small foil rolls, and it came out of the same New York State trade that gave rise to Philadelphia-brand cream cheese. Pairing it with Boston brown bread was a standing combination of the period, the sweet steamed loaf playing against salty cheese, and butternuts were still a common gathered nut in the Northeast at the time this was written.