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Bread Used for Sandwiches
Bread used for sandwiches should not be less than a day old, for the sake of even cutting. The crust should be trimmed off neatly, the butter should be put on evenly. To prepare nuts for sandwiches, first chop very fine, then pound to a paste; salt well, mix well with butter and spread; or mix finely chopped nuts with just enough of cream salad dressing to slightly moisten.
This is really two things at once: general guidance on sandwich bread and a working formula for a nut butter spread. The nut portion is the part that needs translating.
- Day-old bread, and whyFresh bread compresses and tears under the knife; a day of staling firms the crumb enough to cut clean thin slices. A close-grained sandwich loaf works better than an open artisan crumb, which lets filling leak through the holes.
- Butter to the edgesThe even layer of butter is not only for flavour. It seals the crumb against a moist filling, which is why it matters more with the dressing-moistened version than with the plain nut paste.
- Chop, then poundPounding to a paste in a mortar is the period method for what a food processor now does in thirty seconds. Pulse rather than run it continuously, or the nuts heat and turn to loose oily butter instead of a spreadable paste.
- Which nutsThe recipe does not say. Walnuts, pecans, almonds and peanuts are all plausible candidates for a spread of this kind. Toasting them lightly first is not in the original but improves the flavour.
- "Cream salad dressing"In cookbooks of this kind the term usually indicates a cooked boiled dressing thickened with egg, sometimes enriched with cream, rather than a bottled creamy vinaigrette; a mayonnaise-type dressing is the nearest modern equivalent. Add it a teaspoon at a time; the instruction is to moisten slightly, not to make a salad.
- ProportionsNone are given. Around two parts nut paste to one part softened butter by volume spreads well and is a reasonable starting point.
- ServingThe original trims the crust before buttering; trimming after filling and pressing gives a cleaner edge if you prefer. Cut into fingers or triangles with a long thin knife, wiped between cuts.
Nut sandwiches turn up constantly in American cookbooks of the period, a moment when nuts were being promoted heavily as a meat substitute by vegetarian and health reformers, and when afternoon tea and the ladies' luncheon had made the small trimmed sandwich a fixture of respectable entertaining. The pound-to-a-paste technique described here is the same one that produced early peanut butter, which was ground and sold commercially in this period but was not yet the pantry staple it later became. The insistence on day-old bread, neatly trimmed crusts and evenly spread butter is characteristic of the genre: much of the instruction in these sandwich chapters is about appearance and precision rather than cookery, because the sandwich was judged on the table as much as on the palate.