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Indian Sandwiches
Take the white meat of a cold boiled or baked chicken and chop it fine, add to it a half cup of chopped cold boiled ham or tongue, mix, and add a teaspoonful of essence of
The text on this page breaks off mid-instruction, so what follows is guidance for finishing a filling that the book never lets you finish. Treat the fragment as a ratio rather than a set of directions.
- The recipe is incompleteThe page stops at "a teaspoonful of essence of." The missing word cannot be recovered from the text; essence of anchovy and a curry-flavoured seasoning are both plausible, the latter given the name. Nothing survives about binding, seasoning or assembly, so anything past the ham is reconstruction.
- ProportionsThe recipe gives no quantity for the chicken, only the half cup of ham or tongue. The white meat of one small cold chicken yields somewhere around one and a half to two cups chopped, which would put the ratio at roughly three or four to one and make enough filling for perhaps six to eight sandwiches on thin white bread.
- "Chop it fine" is not "grind it"Period cooks meant hand-chopping to a coarse mince on a board. A food processor turns cold chicken breast into paste in seconds; pulse it or chop by hand if you want the filling to read as meat.
- Essence of anchovyA thin, salty anchovy sauce sold bottled through the nineteenth century. Anchovy paste thinned with a little water is the closest modern equivalent, and a teaspoon of it is enough to salt the whole mixture — season at the end, not the start.
- Cold boiled tongueBeef tongue was an ordinary larder item in the period and is now a butcher's order. Any well-cured ham, or a piece of good boiled gammon, does the same job of adding salt and colour.
- It needs a binderChopped meat alone will not hold on bread. A few tablespoons of mayonnaise, or softened butter for a firmer filling, brings it together; butter also keeps the bread from going damp.
- Cold chicken, kept coldThis is a use-up recipe for meat already cooked. Keep the chicken refrigerated, make the filling the day you assemble the sandwiches, and do not let the finished plate stand at room temperature for more than a couple of hours.
"Indian" on a Victorian American menu often meant curry-scented — the exception being Indian meal, which meant cornmeal — and it attached itself freely to anything given a shake of curry powder or a spoonful of a bottled colonial-style sauce. Chopped-meat sandwich fillings of this kind belong to the late-century summer table, where the aim was to make a meal out of yesterday's roast without lighting the range again, and cold chicken bulked out with a little salty cured meat was one way to do it. Anchovy essence, Worcestershire and curry powder all did the same work of making cold poultry taste of something. The recipe's abrupt end here may be nothing more than a break in the page or the scan rather than a mystery of the period; the seasoning it was reaching for would have been unremarkable to anyone who owned the book.