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MIXED SANDWICHES
Chop fine, cold ham, tongue and chicken; mix with one pint of the meat half a cup melted butter, one table-spoon salad-oil, one of mustard if desired, the yolk of a beaten egg, and a little pepper; spread on bread cut thin and buttered. Ham alone may be prepared in this way.
A leftovers spread from the Fragments chapter: cold roast meats bound with butter into something closer to potted meat than to modern deli filling. The proportions are the thing worth watching.
- The hinge: chop, don't puréeThe spread should read as minced meat held together by butter, not as a smooth paste. A food processor will take it to baby food in four seconds; pulse in short bursts, or chop by hand with a heavy knife.
- One pint of meatA pint is 2 cups, which as chopped meat comes to roughly 1 lb packed. The recipe gives no ratio for the ham, tongue and chicken; equal parts is a reasonable reading, and any ratio of the three works.
- Half a cup of melted butterThat is 4 oz to 1 lb of meat, a deliberately rich potted-meat proportion that sets firm when chilled. If you want a spread that stays soft at table temperature, cut it to 4-6 tablespoons and add a spoonful of the meat's own jelly or a little stock.
- Salad-oilIn the nineteenth century salad-oil usually meant olive oil, though bland cottonseed and other seed oils were also sold under that name by the 1870s. A tablespoon of a mild or neutral oil is closer to the original than a green, peppery modern extra-virgin.
- Mustard"One of mustard" means one tablespoon, and prepared mustard is the safer reading; a tablespoon of English mustard powder would be aggressive against a single pint of meat.
- The raw yolkThe yolk binds the butter and oil into an emulsion and is never cooked. Use a pasteurized egg if you are serving anyone elderly, pregnant or immune-compromised, or leave it out and add a spoonful of mayonnaise instead.
- Keeping itButter-bound meat spread is a refrigerator item, good for two or three days in a covered crock. Take it out twenty minutes before spreading or it will tear thin bread.
- YieldAbout 2 1/2 cups of spread, enough for 12 to 16 thin-bread sandwiches. The recipe specifies only bread "cut thin and buttered"; trimming and quartering is a serving choice, not an instruction in the text.
This sits in Fragments, the chapter of Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (compiled by Estelle Woods Wilcox from recipes contributed by women of Marysville, Ohio, and first published in the 1870s) devoted to using up what was already cooked. In a household that roasted whole hams, boiled whole tongues and served whole fowls, the tail ends of three different meats were a normal problem, and one common answer was to mince them and bind them with butter -- the same logic as English potted meat, in which a butter seal kept air off the meat beneath. Sandwiches were still a relatively recent fixture on American tables when this book appeared, often associated with travel, picnics and evening company; the instruction to spread it on bread "cut thin and buttered" fits that genteel tea-tray tradition rather than anything you would pack for a day's work.