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Meat Sandwiches
An infinite variety of meat sandwiches can be made-beef, lamb, chicken, ham, tongue, etc. The meat may be sliced thin and placed between buttered bread or minced and mixed with mustard, catsup, Mayonnaise or cooked salad dressing.
This is a formula rather than a fixed recipe: one line of guidance meant to be applied to whatever cold roast is left in the larder. A few of its assumptions need translating.
- What the meat isThe likely premise is cold cooked meat carved from a joint or a boiled fowl, though ham and tongue would often have been bought ready cured. Deli meat works, but the intended texture is dense hand-carved slices or a coarse mince, not the paste a food processor will give you if you let it run.
- Cooked salad dressingThis means boiled dressing: a cooked custard of egg, vinegar, mustard, sugar and milk or butter, thickened over heat. It was a common everyday alternative to mayonnaise -- cheaper, and it kept better -- and it is tangier and less rich. Any modern boiled-dressing recipe stands in for it.
- Catsup in this periodNot necessarily tomato, though tomato catsup was by then the usual sort; mushroom and walnut catsups were still made and still occasionally meant. Tomato catsup of the era was thinner and sharper than the thick sweet product now sold, so modern ketchup will read noticeably sweeter against plain cold beef.
- Butter to the edgesThe butter is structural, not seasoning. Spread it fully to the crust on both slices so the bread does not go damp from the dressing or the meat juices, which matters if the sandwiches are being cut in advance for a tea or a picnic.
- Season the minceCold cooked meat tastes flatter than it did hot. A minced filling wants salt, pepper and something acid or sharp beyond the dressing itself, which is why mustard and catsup are on the list.
- TongueWhole cooked tongue was a standard cold-larder item then and is a special order now. Sliced cured tongue from a delicatessen is the practical substitute.
- Keeping and yieldNo quantity is given. Reckon about 2 to 3 oz of meat per sandwich; a cup of mince fills two or three. Keep filled sandwiches refrigerated and eat them the same day, particularly with a mayonnaise or egg-based dressing.
The instruction belongs to the early twentieth-century sandwich boom, when cheap bakery bread, paraffin paper and the rise of packed lunches and card parties were turning the sandwich into a fixed part of American home cooking. Many cookbooks of the period gave sandwich fillings as a rule rather than a measured quantity, as here, leaving the cook to match it against whatever the Sunday roast had left behind.