Home › Sandwiches › Cream Cheese and Walnut Sandwich
Cream Cheese and Walnut Sandwich
Cut fine a cupful of any kind of walnuts; work them to a smooth paste, with cream cheese, softening this with cream until it will spread readily on thin slices of bread.
A three-ingredient spread with no quantities beyond the cup of nuts. The proportions are yours to set, so work by feel and taste as you go.
- The hinge: grind the nuts before adding cheeseThe hinge: cut the nuts fine before they meet the cheese -- the recipe has you chop first, then work nuts and cheese together. Finely cut walnuts release enough oil to bind; coarse pieces stay gritty and tear thin bread. A food processor does the work in seconds, but pulse rather than run it or you get walnut butter.
- What "cream cheese" meantIn this period the term usually meant a fresh, unripened soft cheese, closer to what is sold today as Neufch o to the stabilized block. Modern block cream cheese works, but it is firmer and stiffer, which is why the recipe tells you to slacken it with cream.
- "Any kind of walnuts"American cookbooks of the period distinguished English walnuts from black walnuts and butternuts; the black walnut and butternut were commonly gathered from local trees, while English walnuts were generally bought. Black walnuts are far more assertive and will dominate the cheese; English walnuts give the mild version most readers will expect.
- QuantitiesA cupful of nuts to about 8 oz of soft cheese gives a spread that is nutty without being crumbly. Add cream a tablespoon at a time; the paste should slump slightly off the knife but not run.
- BitternessWalnut skins carry tannin, and old nuts turn rancid quickly because of their high oil content. Taste one before committing the cup, and toast them briefly if you want the flavor rounder.
- Bread and assemblyThe recipe specifies only "thin slices." A firm white loaf cut thin, spread edge to edge, suits it; if you trim the crusts, do it after closing the sandwich rather than before.
- YieldEnough filling for roughly a dozen small tea sandwiches, or eight standard ones. It keeps three or four days covered in the refrigerator, though the cream will need to be worked smooth again.
Nut-and-cheese sandwiches belong to the American ladies' luncheon and afternoon tea of the 1890s and 1900s, when thin bread, trimmed crusts and soft spreads defined a whole genre distinct from the workman's meat sandwich. Their popularity owed a good deal to the commercial arrival of soft fresh cheese sold in foil-wrapped bricks, the trade there dating from the 1870s and 1880s, a mild, spreadable base where earlier books had called for butter or homemade curd. Walnuts were the obvious partner because they were cheap and domestically grown. The vagueness here about which walnut is telling: a household would use whatever the local trees or the local grocer supplied.