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Chicken and Mayonnaise Sandwiches
Chop the white or the dark meat (as preferred) of the chicken very fine, mix it with a mayonnaise, and spread bread with the paste, using no butter.
A two-line formula that assumes you have cold roast chicken and a bowl of mayonnaise already in the larder. Everything depends on the texture of the chop and the ratio of dressing to meat.
- Chop, do not process"Very fine" here means knife-minced to about the size of coarse breadcrumbs, so the filling still reads as meat. A food processor will quickly reduce cooked chicken to a pasty mousse; if you use one, pulse and check constantly.
- ProportionsThe original gives none. Roughly 2 cups finely chopped cooked chicken (about 10 oz) to 1/3 cup mayonnaise gives a paste that spreads without sliding out of the sandwich. Add the dressing in stages.
- "Using no butter"This is the hinge of the instruction. Butter is normally spread on sandwich bread as a moisture barrier, but the mayonnaise supplies the fat here, and doubling up makes the sandwich greasy. The tradeoff is that the bread will go soggy faster, so assemble close to serving.
- Mayonnaise and raw eggA period mayonnaise was made at home from raw yolks. If you make your own for a filling that will never be cooked, use pasteurized eggs, particularly if serving children, older guests or anyone pregnant. Commercial jarred mayonnaise is made with pasteurized egg and carries no such concern.
- SeasoningThe recipe assumes the mayonnaise carries all the salt. Cold chicken is bland; taste the finished paste and correct with salt and a squeeze of lemon, which also keeps the dressing from tasting flat.
- White meat or darkDark meat has more fat and stays moist, but it also greys the filling. Breast meat is the conventional choice for a tea sandwich for appearance as much as flavour.
- Bread and trimmingThin-sliced firm white bread, crusts cut off after filling rather than before, then quartered. A loaf of about 20 slices and the quantities above will make roughly 10 rounds, or 40 small sandwiches.
- HoldingMade-up sandwiches keep an hour or two covered with a damp cloth and refrigerated. Chicken in mayonnaise is a classic vehicle for bacterial growth left at room temperature; keep the filling cold until it goes on the bread.
Sandwiches occupied a whole chapter in turn-of-the-century American household books because the afternoon tea, the picnic basket and the railway luncheon all demanded food that travelled in the hand. The Butterick Publishing Company, better known for dress patterns and The Delineator, aimed its cook book at the same middle-class housekeeper it sold sleeve patterns to, and the terse style here is typical: the reader is assumed to have leftover roast fowl and a standing recipe for mayonnaise elsewhere in the book. Mayonnaise itself was well established in American home cooking by this period, still made by hand with a fork or a whisk; commercial jarred mayonnaise did not reach American grocers in quantity until the 1910s and after. The instruction to omit butter is the sort of small economy of taste that one might read as marking a sandwich meant for a tea table rather than one packed for a workman's dinner pail, though the book itself says nothing of the kind.