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Aberdeen Sandwiches
Heat one-fourth a cup of chopped cold tongue or ham, and half a cup of chopped veal or chicken, with half a cup of good sauce and two tablespoonfuls of curry paste (curry powder mixed with
A hot curried meat filling made in the chafing dish from cooked leftovers, spread on toast or bread. The proportions are small — this is a filling for four or five sandwiches, not a supper dish.
- "Good sauce"Most likely a thick white or brown sauce of the usual sort, made from butter, flour and stock or milk; something on the order of a tablespoon each of butter and flour to half a cup of liquid would be stiff enough to bind, which matters here or the filling will soak the bread.
- Curry pasteThe parenthesis in the original is clearly explaining that "curry paste" here means curry powder worked to a paste at home rather than a jarred Indian paste, but the text breaks off before naming what it is mixed with (butter is the usual choice in books of this kind). Commercial pastes today are more acidic and much saltier, so measure by taste.
- Bloom the curryThe recipe heats everything together, but cooking the powder in fat for a minute or two before the sauce goes in helps; curry powder stirred raw into a finished sauce can keep a chalky, dusty edge.
- The meat is already cookedThe tongue or ham goes in cold, and the veal or chicken is understood to be cooked as well. They need only to heat through, a few minutes of gentle heat; chopped veal and chicken shred and dry out over a hard direct flame.
- Cold tongueCooked beef tongue, whole or sliced, was a common larder item in households of this period and is now usually a butcher's order. The recipe already offers ham as an alternative.
Curried minced meat on bread belongs to a long Anglo-Indian line in British and American cookery, where curry powder was treated as a seasoning for leftovers rather than the basis of a dish in its own right. Names like "Aberdeen" were attached freely to sandwiches and savouries in books of this period and rarely denote anything Scottish beyond fashion; the connection is traditional at best. Around 1900 the chafing dish was near the height of American home entertaining, and cookbooks of the decade gave whole sections to small hot dishes a hostess could finish at the table in front of her guests. A filling built from cold tongue, cooked veal and half a cup of yesterday's sauce also shows the frugal habit underneath the fashion.