Home › Sandwiches › Peanut Sandwiches
Peanut Sandwiches
Chop the peanuts fine and mix with mayonnaise dressing, and with a little whipped cream, and spread between thin slices of bread.
A one-sentence recipe that assumes you already know the proportions, so the work is in getting the ratio and the texture right. The point of the whipped cream is to lighten a filling that would otherwise be stiff and claggy.
- ProportionsThe original gives none. About 1 cup finely chopped roasted peanuts to 3 tablespoons mayonnaise and 2 tablespoons whipped cream makes a spreadable filling; add the cream last and only until it just holds together.
- The peanutsThe original does not say; roasted, shelled peanuts with the papery skins rubbed off will give a cleaner-tasting, less speckled filling. Chop by hand or pulse briefly — a food processor run too long gives you peanut butter, which is a different sandwich.
- SaltThe original says nothing about salt. If yours are salted, skip any further seasoning and taste before adding more mayonnaise.
- Whipped creamUnsweetened, whipped to soft peaks and folded in. It collapses within an hour or two, so mix and spread close to serving rather than making the filling ahead.
- Mayonnaise"Mayonnaise dressing" here means a homemade boiled or emulsified dressing, thinner and sharper than jarred mayonnaise. Commercial mayonnaise works; a squeeze of lemon brings it closer.
- The breadThin slices of a close-grained white loaf; buttering the cut side lightly keeps the filling from soaking in. Crusts are usually trimmed for a sandwich of this kind, though the recipe does not say so.
- YieldThe quantities above fill about eight sandwiches; cut into halves or quarters that gives sixteen to thirty-two small tea sandwiches.
Peanuts moved from a street-vendor snack to a respectable ingredient in American home cooking around the turn of the twentieth century, helped along by the arrival of commercial peanut butter in the 1890s and by dietary reformers who promoted nuts as a meat substitute. Sandwich chapters of the period fill up with nut fillings of exactly this kind: something ground fine, bound with mayonnaise or butter, lightened with cream, and pressed between crustless bread for afternoon tea, card parties and picnic baskets. The whipped cream may well be a tell — it suggests, though one can only guess, a ladies' luncheon sandwich rather than a lunch-pail one, meant to be eaten within the hour in a room where nobody was expected to be very hungry.