Home › Sandwiches › Hot Meat Sandwiches
Hot Meat Sandwiches
Mrs. James H. Swan.
Mix and sift 2 C flour with 4 t baking powder and 1t salt. Work in 4 T butter and mix to a soft dough with milk or water. Turn out on floured board, pat and roll into a thin rectangular sheet. Have ready some chopped cooked meat. Season to taste, moisten with a little sauce or gravy and spread on the dough. Roll up like a jelly roll; with a sharp knife cut into 6 or 8 pieces and place these on end in a greased pan. Dot each piece with a little butter. Bake in a rather quick oven about 1/2 hour. Serve hot with brown or cream sauce. The more delicate meats, as chicken, veal, lamb, etc., require a white sauce, while heavier meats, roast beef, steak, corned beef, require a brown sauce.
A baking-powder biscuit dough rolled around leftover meat and baked in pinwheels — essentially a savoury jelly roll, and a standard way of stretching Sunday's roast through Monday.
- The abbreviationsC is cup, t is teaspoon, T is tablespoon. So: 2 cups flour, 4 teaspoons baking powder, 1 teaspoon salt, 4 tablespoons (½ stick) butter. By modern practice 3 teaspoons of baking powder is ample for 2 cups of flour.
- "A rather quick oven"Period cookbooks generally put a quick oven somewhere around 400–425F, so about 425F is a reasonable modern reading. At that heat the pinwheels may be ready before the stated half hour; check for a browned top and a dry bottom edge.
- Liquid is unmeasured on purposeExpect roughly ¾ cup of milk for 2 cups of flour, added a little at a time. The dough should be soft and slightly tacky, not stiff; overworking it makes the pinwheels tough.
- How much meatThe original assumes whatever is in the cold pantry. About 2 cups of finely chopped cooked meat suits this quantity of dough, moistened with 3 or 4 tablespoons of gravy — enough to bind, not enough to soak the dough and prevent it rising.
- "Thin" is relativeRoll to about ¼ inch. Thinner and the roll tears when you lift it; thicker and the centre spiral stays doughy. Rolling from the long edge gives more turns and a better-looking slice.
- Cutting cleanlyA sharp thin blade or a length of dental floss slid under the roll and pulled up will cut the spiral without crushing it. Slices go cut-side up, close together in the pan so they support each other as they rise.
- The sauce is not optionalBiscuit dough and dry leftover meat need the sauce to make sense of them; the note about white sauce for pale meats and brown for red is the whole seasoning logic of the dish. Make it while the pan bakes.
- YieldSix to eight pinwheels, which is two to four servings with sauce and a vegetable.
Recipes like this one belong to the long tradition of the "made dish" — a way of turning Sunday's joint into Monday's dinner without setting cold meat on the table again. The technique is a savoury adaptation of the jelly roll, which is generally said to have been a fixture of American baking since the mid-nineteenth century. Church and community cookbooks of the early twentieth century, compiled from members' contributions and sold to raise funds, are thick with such dishes: economical, forgiving of quantities, built around what a household already had. The attribution to Mrs. James H. Swan, by her husband's name in the convention of the day, is itself part of the record — such books preserve the cooking of women whose own first names often went unprinted.