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Aberdeen Sandwiches
Chop one ounce of cold tongue or ham and two ounces of cold chicken, put the chopped meat into a saucepan with one-half teacupful of good sauce and about half that quantity of curry paste; let it simmer for five minutes, stirring it constantly, then put it into a bowl and leave until cool. Cut some thin slices of stale bread, stamp them into rounds about the size of half a dollar silver piece, and fry them to a very light brown in boiling lard or oil. Lay them on paper to drain. Then put a thick layer of the cooled mixture of chopped ham and chicken between two fried rounds of bread, arrange them nicely on a dish, bake them in the oven for four or five minutes and serve hot. Garnish with fried parsley.
A hot canapé from the Waldorf's savoury repertoire, built on a curried meat paste between two fried bread rounds. The quantities are tiny — this is a garnish-scale dish meant to be multiplied.
- The hinge: cool the fillingThe mixture must be cold and stiff before it goes between the rounds, or it slumps out during the final bake. Spread it on a plate rather than leaving it in a bowl and it will set in twenty minutes in the refrigerator.
- TeacupfulA teacupful in American books of this period is usually reckoned at about 3/4 cup, though the measure was never standard; on that reading half a teacupful is roughly 6 tablespoons of sauce and about 3 tablespoons of curry paste. The proportion is deliberately wet; it reduces as it simmers.
- "Good sauce"This probably means a made brown sauce or velouté rather than a bottled table sauce. A well-reduced demi-glace or a thick chicken velouté does the job; canned condensed soup does not.
- Curry pasteThe curry pastes sold in the 1890s, Crosse & Blackwell's among them, were mild commercial products, generally far milder than a modern Thai or Madras paste. Start with a third of the stated amount if you are using a current paste and taste up.
- TongueCold cooked beef tongue was standard cold-larder material then and is a specialty purchase now. Ham is given as the alternative in the recipe itself and needs no apology.
- Size of the roundsA half-dollar silver piece is about 1 1/4 inches across, so these are one-bite canapés. Stale bread is specified because fresh bread tears under the cutter and soaks up more fat.
- Frying the bread"Boiling lard" means fat at about 350-375F, not literally boiling. The rounds brown in well under a minute, so fry in small batches and pull them pale — they take on more color in the oven.
- The finishing bakeThe recipe gives no temperature; four or five minutes in a hot oven is enough to heat the filling through. Any longer and the fried bread hardens.
- Fried parsleyParsley must be bone dry before it meets hot fat or it will spit violently. It needs only a few seconds and should stay bright green.
- YieldThree ounces of meat plus sauce fills roughly eight to ten sandwiches — enough for two or three people as a savoury course. Scale up by whole multiples for a party.
Oscar Tschirky, maître d'hôtel at the Waldorf and later the Waldorf-Astoria, put his name to this collection in 1896, and its "kitchen" chapters read as a working inventory of what an American luxury hotel of the 1890s was expected to produce on demand. Small hot savouries like these belonged to the end of a long dinner or to the supper service after the theatre, where something warm, salty and spiced was wanted in a single bite. The curry is not incidental: mild commercial curry pastes and powders had been a fixture of Anglo-American hotel cooking for decades by then, and "curried" in this context signals a British colonial idiom absorbed into French-service menus rather than any Indian dish. The name is harder to pin down — hotel kitchens of the era attached place-names to garnishes and canapés with considerable freedom, and Aberdeen appears often enough in Victorian cookery as a tag for Scottish provenance that the label is best read as decorative rather than descriptive. Nothing in the method is Scottish, and no documented origin for the name attaches to this particular preparation.