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Hudson Sandwiches
2 tablespoonfuls Crisco 1/2 lb. cooked meat 6 stoned olives 1 teaspoonful capers 2 hard-cooked eggs Salt and pepper to taste Crisp lettuce leaves 12 picked shrimps Parsley Brown bread Put through food chopper cooked meat, olives, capers, and yolks of hard cooked eggs, then add Crisco and seasonings. Spread mixture on slices of buttered brow bread, and stamp them out with a round cutter; sprinkle surfaces of sandwiches with chopped whites of eggs. Dish up in circular fashion. Put lettuce in center with shrimps and a few springs of parsley. This sandwich quite repays the trouble of making.
Sufficient for twenty sandwiches.
A tea-table sandwich from a Crisco promotional book, built on a ground meat-and-olive paste. Nothing here is difficult; the only real decisions are what to use in place of the shortening and what the author meant by brown bread.
- The Crisco is the weak pointTwo tablespoons of solid vegetable shortening are there to bind the paste and, in a book published to advertise the product, to put Crisco into even a cold spread. Softened butter, mayonnaise or a mix of the two binds better and tastes of something.
- Brown bread is ambiguousIt most likely means a whole-wheat or graham loaf sliced thin rather than steamed Boston brown bread, though the recipe does not say. Either will work, but the dense steamed kind crumbles badly under a round cutter.
- Food chopperA hand-cranked grinder. A food processor does the same job in seconds; pulse rather than run it, or the filling turns to paste and loses all texture.
- Picked shrimpsSmall cooked shrimp, shelled and deveined. They are garnish only, arranged in the centre of the platter, not mixed into the filling.
- Cooked meatHalf a pound of any leftover roast: beef, veal, ham, tongue or chicken. Trim gristle before grinding, since the chopper will not.
- Stoned olivesPitted olives; the recipe does not say which kind. Six is modest for half a pound of meat; taste before salting, as olives and capers both carry a good deal of salt already.
- Yield and wasteTwenty rounds. A round cutter leaves a good deal of trim from each slice; save the trimmings for crumbs, or skip the cutter and cut squares on the diagonal.
- HoldingThe filling can be made a day ahead and refrigerated, but assemble within a couple of hours of serving and keep the platter covered with a damp cloth, or the cut edges dry and curl.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil for Procter & Gamble to promote Crisco, introduced in 1911, and the book finds roles for the new hydrogenated shortening throughout, including cold sandwich fillings where a cook would ordinarily have reached for butter. That commercial purpose explains the two tablespoons here, which do very little the butter on the bread is not already doing. The sandwich itself belongs to the fashion for stamped-out rounds served on a platter with a lettuce and parsley centrepiece, a style of afternoon-tea and luncheon service common in American and British household books of the 1900s and 1910s; the name is presumably geographic, in the manner of the period's habit of attaching a place to any composed dish, though the book offers no explanation for it.