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Chicken and Ham Sandwiches
Put a breakfast-cupful of good gravy into a saucepan, with three dessert-spoonfuls of curry paste mixed smoothly in it. Add half a pound of the flesh of a cold chicken, and two ounces of lean ham finely minced. Let the ingredients boil for ten minutes, then turn them out. Cut some slices of stale bread about the eighth of an inch in thickness, and stamp them out in shapes. Fry them in a little butter, spread some of the mixture between two of them, and put over it a little slice of cheese, and a piece of butter. Press it well down, bake the sandwiches in a quick oven, on a baking sheet, and serve them as hot as possible, piled high on a napkin. Time, five minutes to bake. Allow two or three for each person. Probable cost, 8d., exclusive of the cold meat.
A hot fried-bread savoury rather than a lunchbox sandwich, and the whole thing hinges on the filling being thick enough not to soak the bread. Reduce it hard before you assemble.
- Breakfast-cupfulA breakfast cup is larger than a teacup: reckon 8 to 10 fl oz, so about 1 to 1 1/4 cups (250-300 ml). Dessert-spoonfuls are roughly 2 teaspoons each, so three is about 2 tablespoons of paste.
- Quick ovenRoughly 400-450F (200-230C). Five minutes at that heat is enough to melt the cheese and crisp the outside; longer and the fried bread hardens.
- Curry pasteVictorian curry paste was an oily spice compound, either bought bottled or made up at home, and probably tamer than most jarred Thai or Indian pastes sold today. Start with half the quantity, taste, and add more once the mixture has reduced.
- Good gravyThis means well-reduced meat stock or leftover roast gravy with body to it, not thin broth. Boil the mixture until it clings to the meat like a thick sauce; a wet filling will turn the bread to pulp in the oven.
- Boil for ten minutesThe chicken and ham are already cooked, so the ten minutes is for reduction, not doneness. Watch it and pull it off when it mounds on the spoon rather than counting the clock.
- Stale bread, an eighth of an inchYou need a close-crumbed day-old loaf; fresh sandwich bread will tear at that thickness. Cut with a serrated knife, then stamp rounds with a plain cutter, saving the trimmings for crumbs.
- The cheeseA firm English cheese such as Cheddar or Cheshire, cut in a thin slice that sits on top of the assembled sandwich, not inside it. It browns and glues the pieces together in the oven.
- YieldHalf a pound of chicken with 2 oz of ham fills something like 12 to 16 small sandwiches (so twice that many stamped rounds of bread), which at the recipe's two or three each serves five or six as a savoury or supper dish. Serve straight from the oven; they do not hold.
Cassell's belongs to the era when a "sandwich" could just as easily arrive hot on a folded napkin as cold in a hamper, and when the honourable end for cold roast fowl was to be minced, spiced and served up again in a form nobody would mistake for leftovers. The curry paste is the tell: bottled curry pastes and powders were staple British grocery items by the middle of the nineteenth century, an Anglo-Indian import that domestic cookery absorbed chiefly as a way of making yesterday's meat taste deliberate. Dishes of this kind were often sent up as a savoury, the small hot course between sweet and dessert in a Victorian dinner, or as a supper dish after the theatre. The costing in pence, "exclusive of the cold meat", is characteristic of the book's readership: a household mistress budgeting a week's meals, for whom the point of the recipe was that the expensive part was already paid for.