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Chicken Sandwiches
Chop cold boiled chicken, and moisten with Mayonnaise or Cream Salad Dressing; or season with salt and pepper, and moisten with rich chicken stock. Prepare as other sandwiches.
Farmer assumes you have already read her general sandwich method, so this entry is deliberately thin. The gaps are worth filling before you start.
- "Prepare as other sandwiches"In Farmer's scheme that means bread cut thin from a day-old loaf, buttered before slicing where possible, crusts trimmed, filling spread evenly to the edges, and the sandwiches cut in triangles or fingers. Sandwiches made in advance are wrapped in a damp napkin and kept in a cool place.
- Cold boiled chickenMeat from a boiled fowl, cooled and picked, is the likely starting point, though the recipe does not say so. It gives no quantities; two cups of chopped meat will fill roughly a dozen small sandwiches. Poached or roast chicken works, but hold back on salt if the meat was brined.
- Chop, do not shredThe period texture is a fine even mince made with a knife or a wooden chopping bowl, not the long pulled strands of modern chicken salad. Chopped meat sits flat and the sandwich does not fall apart when cut.
- Cream Salad DressingFarmer's version elsewhere in the book is a cooked dressing of egg yolks, butter, vinegar and cream, thickened over hot water, closer to a thin boiled custard than to mayonnaise. Bottled mayonnaise or a homemade one is the simpler substitute; use just enough to bind, since a wet filling soaks the bread.
- The stock version"rich chicken stock" probably implies a stock with enough body to gel, which would set as the filling cools and give a firmer, less rich sandwich. Cold stock, stirred in a spoonful at a time, does this best; warm stock will just make the mixture slack.
- Raw egg in the mayonnaiseIf you make the mayonnaise rather than buying it, the eggs are not cooked. Use pasteurized eggs if serving anyone elderly, pregnant or immune-compromised, and keep the finished sandwiches refrigerated until they go out.
- Holding timeChicken bound with dressing should not sit at room temperature more than a couple of hours. Assemble close to serving and keep them covered and cold, which also stops the bread drying at the cut edges.
Sandwiches occupy a section of Farmer's book because by the 1890s they had become the backbone of American afternoon tea, church suppers, railway journeys and picnic baskets, and cookery writers were expected to catalogue the fillings rather than teach the form. Chicken was the obvious candidate: the picked meat of a boiled fowl was a byproduct that needed using. The two alternatives Farmer offers track two different economies of the same bird, one binding the meat with an egg-and-cream dressing and the other with the jellied stock it was cooked in, so that nothing is bought in especially. The instruction to "prepare as other sandwiches" is characteristic of the book's method-first structure, in which a general technique is described once and then referred back to, a habit that made the volume useful as a teaching text at the Boston Cooking School and unhelpfully terse to anyone reading a single page out of context.