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Sweet Nut Sandwiches
Chop together one-half cupful of seeded raisins, one cupful of English walnuts; add one-quarter of a cupful of grated cocoanut, one tablespoonful of grated chocolate and mix well together, moistening with sweet cream.
A sandwich filling rather than a finished sandwich: the original assumes you know to spread it on thin buttered bread and trim the crusts. A few of the ingredient names have shifted since 1900.
- Seeded raisins"Seeded" means the seeds have been removed, typically from a large muscatel-type raisin; seedless raisins existed by this date but were still sold as a separate item. Any modern raisin is already seedless, so use them as they come.
- English walnutsThe ordinary walnut sold everywhere today. The name distinguished it from the American black walnut, which is far stronger and more resinous and would overwhelm this filling.
- Grated chocolateA tablespoon grated from a block of unsweetened baking chocolate. Cocoa powder is not a substitute in the same volume, and modern chips will not grate; shave a bar with a microplane or the coarse side of a box grater.
- CocoanutPeriod recipes mean fresh coconut grated from the shell, or the unsweetened desiccated kind sold in packets. Sweetened flaked coconut will make the filling cloying alongside the raisins.
- Sweet creamSimply fresh, unsoured cream, as opposed to the soured cream that was common in a kitchen without refrigeration. Heavy or whipping cream is right; add it a teaspoon at a time until the mixture just holds together.
- ChoppingChop the raisins and walnuts together on a board rather than in a food processor, which turns the walnuts to oily paste and the raisins to a single mass. The filling wants visible texture.
- Yield and servingEnough for roughly six to eight sandwiches on thin white or brown bread, cut into fingers or triangles. Butter the bread first so the cream does not soak through, and keep the sandwiches covered with a damp cloth until served.
- KeepingOnce cream is added the filling is perishable; make it the same day, refrigerate, and use within a few hours.
Sweet sandwiches belong to the American afternoon tea and luncheon table of the 1890s and 1900s, when the sandwich course expanded well past cold meat into nuts, dried fruit, jam and cheese. Their appearance in a general household manual reflects two things happening at once: walnuts, coconut and chocolate had all become more widely available for everyday use, and the ladies' luncheon had created demand for something small, sweet and portable that was not cake. Coconut in particular is generally said to have gone from an exotic import to a pantry staple in the decades after commercial desiccating and packing began in the United States in the mid-1890s, and recipes of this period do call for it freely.