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Rice Sandwiches
1 tablespoonful Crisco 1/2 cupful rice 1 sprig parsley 1 blade mace 1 strip lemon peel 2 tablespoonfuls chopped cooked liver 2 tablespoonfuls chopped cooked ham Salt and pepper to taste Bread Boil rice in plenty of boiling salted water, add parsley, mace, and lemon peel. When quite tender strain off water, take out parsley, mace, and lemon, and stir into the rice, liver, Crisco, ham, and seasonings. Cut an even number of slices of bread, spread mixture when cold on one-half, and cover with remaining slices of bread. Trim an cut into diamond shapes. Sufficient for twenty sandwiches.
A frugal savoury spread built on rice rather than butter, from the era when Crisco was being promoted as a universal shortening. It comes together quickly, but the mixture must be seasoned aggressively and spread cold.
- CriscoHydrogenated vegetable shortening, here acting as the binding fat in place of butter. The recipe appears in a book underwritten by its manufacturer; a tablespoon of softened butter does the same job with better flavour.
- A blade of maceOne whole piece of the lacy aril from a nutmeg, not ground mace. If you only have ground, use a pinch stirred in at the end rather than a blade fished out, since it will not strain away.
- Cooking the riceBoiling in "plenty of" salted water is the pasta method: the grains cook loose and are drained. Timing depends on the rice, and this recipe wants it taken past the usual point; the aromatics go into the pot as it cooks so they perfume the grain as it swells.
- "Quite tender"Softer than you would serve rice as a side dish. It needs to mash slightly against the spoon so the mixture holds together on bread instead of scattering.
- The cooked liverLeftover roast or braised liver, chopped fine, or calf's liver gently cooked and cooled. Chicken livers work and are milder; the texture should be paste-like rather than granular, so chop far finer than seems necessary.
- Season while warm, spread when coldSalt and pepper disappear into rice, so taste and correct while the mixture is still warm. Then chill it fully: warm rice will soak into and tear the bread.
- YieldTwenty small sandwiches means thin-cut bread trimmed of crusts and cut into diamonds, roughly two bites each. This is tea-table or buffet scale, not lunch.
This comes from the wave of American cookbooks issued in the 1910s around Crisco, the hydrogenated cottonseed shortening introduced by Procter & Gamble in 1911; the books were promotional, and the shortening turns up in places butter or drippings would traditionally have gone, sandwich fillings included. The filling itself is older in spirit than the fat: chopped cooked liver and ham bound into a paste, scented with mace and lemon peel, belongs to the British and Anglo-American tradition of potted meats, where leftovers from a roast were pounded, seasoned and sealed for the tea table. Rice as the bulk ingredient is the economising touch, stretching four tablespoons of meat across twenty sandwiches. Cutting the finished sandwiches into diamonds rather than squares was one of several fancy shapes in use for afternoon tea and reception food of the period, the small trimmed shape often taken to suggest that the sandwich was a nicety rather than a meal.