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Filling for Meat Sandwiches
Two cups cream or milk, 2 tablespoons (large) Five Roses flour, yolks of 4 eggs, butter size of an egg. Add 1 teaspoon salt, 1 teaspoon mixed mustard, black and red pepper to taste. Beat yolks well, mix in all other ingredients, put in double boiler and cook until thick, stirring constantly to prevent lumps. When cool, beat in ½ cup lemon juice.
Then add any finely - ground meat, such as veal, tongue, ham, chicken, etc. Fresh or potted meats may be used with this recipe. It may be varied by using finely chopped watercress, lettuce, parsley, olives, etc.
This is a cooked egg-yolk dressing — a boiled dressing in the older sense — thinned with lemon juice and then bound with minced meat. Everything hinges on the custard, so treat the first half as a sauce recipe and the second half as assembly.
- Don't let it boilThe yolk mixture goes into a double boiler for a reason: direct heat will scramble it into grains that no amount of stirring will smooth. Take it off while it still coats the spoon and moves under its own weight; it thickens further as it cools.
- Add the lemon juice coldThe instruction to beat in the half cup of lemon juice only when cool is not fussiness. Acid added to a hot yolk custard will curdle it, and half a cup is a substantial amount of acid for two cups of dairy.
- Butter size of an eggRoughly 2 oz, or 4 tablespoons. Nineteenth-century cookbooks used the egg, the walnut and the hazelnut as informal weights; the egg is the largest of the three.
- Five Roses flourA Canadian all-purpose wheat flour from the mill that published the book. Plain all-purpose flour is the direct substitute; two tablespoons is a light thickening for two cups of liquid, with the yolks doing most of the work.
- Mixed mustardPrepared mustard made up from powder with water or vinegar, not dry mustard powder. A teaspoon of a plain English or Dijon-style prepared mustard is the equivalent.
- Red pepperCayenne. Used in pinches here, for warmth behind the mustard rather than heat you notice.
- Potted meatsMeat cooked, pounded to a paste and sealed under clarified butter, either made at home from leftovers or bought ready-potted. Any well-minced cooked meat works — the recipe is a way of using up the end of a roast, a boiled tongue or a chicken carcass.
- Proportion and yieldThe dressing alone makes about three cups, which is more than most sandwich fillings need. Add meat until the mixture just holds together on a knife; leftover dressing keeps a few days covered in the refrigerator and serves as a salad dressing.
- Keep it coldAn egg-and-dairy dressing loaded with cooked meat is a classic warm-weather hazard. Assemble the sandwiches close to serving and keep the filling refrigerated until you use it.
The Five Roses Cook Book was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company of Winnipeg and Montreal, and like most milling-company books of its era it was compiled largely from recipes sent in by women who baked with the brand — a promotional volume that doubled as a national recipe exchange. This filling belongs to the family of boiled or cooked dressings that dominated North American kitchens before commercial mayonnaise became widely available: cheaper than an oil emulsion, and forgiving of the sharp lemon or vinegar note that Victorian and Edwardian palates expected with cold meat.