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Left-Over Sandwiches
After a party, luncheon or picnic, one may find oneself with sandwiches left over.
An excellent plan to use these is the following: pass them through the mincing machine, mix with a good well-seasoned gravy, put in a pie dish and cover with mashed potato about an inch thick. This, baked in the oven, makes a delicious luncheon dish.
A thrift dish rather than a formal recipe: essentially cottage pie built from yesterday's sandwiches. The proportions are left entirely to the cook, so a few numbers help.
- Start with sound sandwichesOnly use sandwiches that were refrigerated promptly, not ones that sat out through an afternoon party or picnic. Some bacterial toxins that develop at room temperature survive baking, so anything left at warm temperatures for more than about two hours should be thrown out rather than repurposed.
- Mincing machineThe hand-cranked meat grinder of the period. A food processor pulsed a few times does the same job; do not run it continuously or the bread turns to paste.
- How much gravyNone is specified. Aim for roughly 1 cup of gravy to 4 cups of minced sandwich — enough to make a moist, spoonable mixture that holds its shape, since dry bread absorbs liquid greedily as it stands.
- Seasoning is the whole dish"Well-seasoned" is doing the real work here. Sandwich fillings are mild and bread is bland, so taste the mixture before it goes in the dish and correct with salt, pepper, mustard, Worcestershire or a little vinegar.
- Watch for mayonnaise and butterSandwiches spread with mayonnaise or salad dressing will loosen the mixture and can turn it greasy once hot. Use less gravy in that case, or choose plainer sandwiches.
- Oven and timeNo temperature is given; something in the region of 375-400F for 30 to 40 minutes should do, until the filling is bubbling at the edges and the potato is browned. The interior should reach 165F, since the meat is being reheated.
- The potato toppingAn inch of mashed potato is a lot; it needs to be soft enough to spread without tearing the filling, and it browns far better with butter dotted over the top or a brief pass under the broiler.
- YieldNo quantities are given. As a rough guide, the mince from eight to ten sandwiches will fill a 9-inch pie dish and serve about four.
The Five Roses Cook Book was issued by the Lake of the Woods Milling Company, whose head office was in Montreal, and distributed to purchasers of its flour, which suits the book's blunt practicality and its recurring theme of using everything up. This page is cottage pie logic applied to a party's wreckage: minced meat bound with gravy under a potato crust is a long-standing British reheating strategy, and the sandwich -- by the early twentieth century a staple of luncheons, teas and picnics -- simply supplied the mince ready-mixed with its bread. Recipes of this kind appear in Canadian and British household books through the 1910s, when domestic thrift was both a moral position and, during the war years, a matter of official encouragement. The Five Roses book expects no waste at all, and treats the leftovers of one meal as the frank starting point of the next.