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Sandwiches (Tongue-and-Veal or Chicken)
Tongue-and-Veal (or Chicken) Sandwiches.
Use a little less of the chopped tongue than of the other kind of meat, and one-half as much chopped celery as meat. Mix with salad dressing.
Spread one piece of bread with butter, the other with the mixture, and press together.
A leftovers sandwich from the era when a cold joint sat in every larder, written in ratios rather than weights. The proportions are the whole recipe, so fix them first.
- The ratio, in cupsRead it as roughly 1 cup chopped veal or chicken, a scant 3/4 cup chopped tongue, and 3/4 to 1 cup chopped celery, bound with 1/3 to 1/2 cup dressing. That makes enough for about six to eight sandwiches.
- "Salad dressing" in 1900In this book the phrase usually means either a cooked (boiled) dressing thickened with egg and flour and sharpened with vinegar, or a hand-beaten mayonnaise. Jarred mayonnaise works; loosen it with a spoonful of vinegar or lemon juice, since the period dressings were noticeably tarter than modern mayonnaise.
- TongueThe original just says tongue: cold cooked beef tongue, sliced from a larger cooking. It may have been fresh-boiled or corned/pickled; the pickled kind is what most delis now sell cooked and sliced, and it is the version that brings salt and colour to the filling. If you cannot get it, cured beef of some kind is a closer substitute than any fresh meat.
- Veal or chickenCold poached or roasted meat, not raw. The dish exists to use up the remains of a boiled fowl or a veal roast, so treat it as a leftovers formula rather than a reason to cook meat specially.
- Chop, do not processEverything should be cut fine with a knife or run through a coarse grinder. A food processor turns tongue and celery into a wet paste and the filling loses the texture the celery is there to supply.
- Season at the endNo salt or pepper is specified because the tongue and the dressing carry it. Taste after mixing; the veal version in particular usually wants pepper, and a little mustard is in keeping with the period.
- Why butter one side onlyThe buttered slice is a moisture barrier against the dressing. Spread it to the very edges, or the bread goes damp within the hour.
- Holding and servingThis is a mayonnaise-bound meat filling; keep it refrigerated and assemble close to serving. For a tea table, trim the crusts and cut into triangles or fingers as the book's other sandwich entries direct.
Janet McKenzie Hill's Salads, Sandwiches and Chafing-Dish Dainties (1899) belongs to the moment when the sandwich stopped being a workman's lunch and became a fixture of American afternoon teas, receptions and card parties. Many of the fillings in the chapter follow the same logic: cold cooked meat, something crisp, and a dressing to bind, which is really the salad chapter reapplied between bread. Tongue is the tell of the period. A cold beef tongue was a standard larder item in a household that bought meat by the joint, and it turns up often in Victorian and Edwardian sandwich and salad receipts because it slices cleanly, keeps well, and seasons whatever bland cold meat it is paired with. Hill was a graduate of the Boston Cooking School and edited the Boston Cooking School Magazine, and the terse, proportional style here "a little less of this than that, half as much celery as meat" is the domestic-science manner: a formula the cook can scale to whatever happens to be left over.