Date and walnut is a sandwich that reads like a slice of tea loaf, and that resemblance is the whole idea. Chopped dates and walnuts are folded into cream cheese and spread on thin brown bread, and the combination deliberately echoes the dense, sweet, nutty date-and-walnut loaf it is named after, only cool and soft instead of baked. The dates supply a concentrated, almost toffee-like sweetness; the walnuts supply a bitter, tannic snap against it; the cream cheese is the cool lactic body that holds the two in balance and keeps the whole thing reading as a sandwich rather than a confection. It is the sweet end of the tea tray, and the sweetness is the point rather than a lapse.
The craft is in the chop and the bind. The dates have to be chopped fine and worked through evenly, because a date left whole becomes a single cloying patch while the rest of the sandwich is plain; spread through the cheese, the sweetness is steady from edge to edge. The walnuts are chopped coarse enough to keep their bite, since a nut ground to dust just tints the filling and surrenders the texture the sandwich exists for. The cream cheese is structural as well as flavour: it is the mortar that holds loose fruit and nut against the crumb so nothing sheds when the sandwich is cut, spread to the edges so no bite is bare. Brown bread is the deliberate carrier, its own nuttiness running with the walnut, and the crusts come off so nothing with real chew competes with a soft filling whose only firm element is the nut.
The variations stay inside the sweet, soft, studded frame. A thread of honey pushing it further toward dessert; celery added to or traded for the walnut, keeping the crunch but turning it watery-fresh and savoury; a firmer cheese folded through to change the body without losing the contrast. The plain cream-cheese-and-walnut sandwich without the dates is its drier sibling, and each of these deserves its own article rather than being crowded in here.