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Toasted Chicken Sandwiches
Cut bread in ¼ inch thick slices. Spread lightly with creamed butter and then arrange thinly sliced chicken between slices of bread. Sprinkle chicken very sparingly with celery salt. Toast until delicately brown on both sides.
A closed sandwich toasted on both sides, written before the electric sandwich press was a household object. The instructions are terse and one measurement is almost certainly a printer's error.
- "4 inch thick slices"Almost certainly a dropped fraction for 1/4-inch slices; a four-inch slab of bread is not something anyone spreads with butter. Cut slices about 1/4 to 3/8 inch thick so the sandwich toasts through without the bread collapsing.
- Creamed butterButter beaten soft and smooth with a spoon or paddle, not melted. Leave it at room temperature for an hour and work it briefly with a fork; it spreads in a thin even film and seals the crumb against the chicken's moisture.
- The chickenThe recipe says only "thinly sliced chicken," which in practice would mean cooked fowl, most likely leftover. Carve it as thinly as you can and lay it in overlapping sheets rather than in chunks, or the sandwich will not press together and the bread will scorch before the middle warms.
- Celery saltThen, as now, ground celery seed cut with salt. Modern blends vary a good deal in salt content, so taste yours first; "very sparingly" is the operative phrase, and a large pinch across a whole sandwich is enough.
- How to toast itThe recipe says only to toast until brown on both sides, which could be done in a hinged wire toaster over coals, on a gridiron, or in a buttered pan. A heavy skillet over medium heat with a light film of butter, weighted with a second pan, gives the same result in about 3 minutes a side.
- DonenessDelicately brown means pale gold, not dark. Because the filling is already cooked, the sandwich is done as soon as the bread colours and the chicken is warmed through.
- YieldReckon on one sandwich per person as a tea or supper dish, or cut each into four fingers with the crusts off for a sandwich plate.
Toasted sandwiches became common in American cookery in the decades either side of 1900, when commercial bakery loaves made uniform slices easy and celery salt was sold ready-mixed. Fundraising and community cookbooks of the period often carried substantial sandwich chapters: sandwiches travel well, can be made in quantity the morning of a supper, and turn the remains of a cooked fowl into something worth setting on a plate. The recipe's brevity is characteristic of the genre, which assumed readers already knew the basic method and needed only the idea and the seasoning.