Cream Cheese Meets This Crunchy Sandwich Addition For A Totally Nutty Bite

A perfect sandwich is a textural adventure, which is why adding something crunchy, like potato chips (or just making a whole sandwich from chips), can really elevate a sandwich beyond just meat and cheese on white bread. That's why this old school, southern tea sandwich is something truly unique. You take cream cheese, some herbs, onions, and then add chopped walnuts.

Cream cheese sandwiches are a staple in American food, from the very weird cream cheese, pineapple and anchovy sandwich, to the cream cheese and olive sandwich, this spreadable, affordable cheese makes a versatile base for your sandwich needs. What elevates this tea sandwich is the use of walnuts, a very refined tree nut. While it's easy for cream cheese sandwiches to become sloppy, viscous messes, the walnuts here add that perfect textural diversity a good sandwich should have. If you use whipped cream cheese, you'll have an even lighter, airer sandwich. It's not hard to see why this combination is a Southern staple.

It's no surprise that if you get bargain, store brand cream cheese you might be dealing with a tacky, gummy mess of a product. And given that cream cheese is the real star of this sandwich — sorry walnuts — it's probably advisable to find the best cream cheese you can. Really good cream cheese is spreadable, somewhat tangy and very mild. It's nice to think of it as a blank culinary canvas to incorporate into savory dishes (bagels and lox anyone?) or something sweet like cheesecake.

For this sandwich it's probably best to just stick with plain old Philadelphia cream cheese. It makes sense: They've been making cream cheese for a very long time. They've been making this stuff since the 1880s, after the inventor of cream cheese, William A. Lawrence, partnered with other dairy producers. Though they have always been based in New York, not Philadelphia. If you want a slightly more niche cream cheese, you can try to find "old fashioned" style cream cheeses, like Sierra Nevada's Gina Marie cheese chub. They make it the very old fashioned way by draining the cultured milk in muslin bags for three days, much like William Lawrence did in the 1800s. Whatever your cream cheese proclivities, this nutty, creamy crunchy sandwich is sure to delight at your next gathering.