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Adelaide Sandwiches
Take one-fourth pound of cold chicken and two ounces of cold ham and cut them into small squares. Mix one teaspoonful of curry paste with one-half teacupful of sauce in a saucepan over the fire, and when it boils mix into it the ham and chicken; take it from the fire and let cool; cut some thin slices of stale bread, stamp them into rounds about the size of a crown piece, and fry them a very light brown in boiling lard or clarified butter. Put a layer of the mixture of chopped meat and sauce between two pieces of fried bread. Pound some grated Parmesan cheese and butter (equal quantities of each) together and roll it into balls about the size of a walnut. Place one of these balls on top of each sandwich, lay them on a baking sheet and place them in a quick oven for five minutes. Serve them on a napkin.
A hot canapé from the Waldorf's larder repertoire: curried chicken and ham between fried bread rounds, capped with a cheese-butter ball that melts down over the top in the oven. Most of the work is in the assembly, and the only vague direction is the one that carries the whole dish.
- "One-half teacupful of sauce"No sauce is specified anywhere in the recipe; a plain white sauce or chicken veloute is the likely intention. A teacupful of the period is usually reckoned at about a gill, so allow roughly 2 fl oz -- thick enough to bind, or the filling will run out of the sandwich in the oven.
- Curry pasteVictorian and Edwardian curry paste was generally a bottled commercial product, a spiced paste quite unlike modern Thai curry pastes. A teaspoon of a mild Madras-style curry paste is a reasonable stand-in; taste the sauce before you bind the meat, as the seasoning and salt of modern brands vary.
- Size of a crown pieceA crown was about 1 1/2 inches across. That gives a two-bite canapé, and it is the right scale: larger rounds collapse under the filling.
- Quick oven425–450F. Five minutes is enough to melt the cheese ball and warm the filling through — the sandwiches are already cooked and will only dry out beyond that.
- Stale breadDay-old bread with a firm crumb is not nostalgia; fresh bread absorbs fat and goes greasy. Cut the slices thin, stamp the rounds, then fry in clarified butter or lard just until pale gold and drain well.
- The cheese ballsEqual weights of grated Parmesan and softened butter, worked smooth, then rolled and chilled firm before they go on the sandwiches. Warm balls slump off the bread on the way to the oven.
- YieldA quarter pound of chicken and two ounces of ham fills roughly 12 to 16 small sandwiches, so plan on two rounds of bread each and cut accordingly.
- Serving"On a napkin" means a folded linen napkin laid on the serving dish to absorb fat and hold the canapés steady. A paper doily or simply a warmed plate does the same job; serve them hot, as the butter sets quickly.
Sandwiches like this belong to the Anglo-American savoury tradition rather than to the lunch counter — small, hot, highly seasoned mouthfuls served late in a meal or with drinks, in the same family as anchovy toasts and devilled biscuits. The curry paste is the giveaway of British influence: bottled curry pastes and powders were staples of the late-nineteenth-century English larder. Who Adelaide was, no surviving explanation tells us. Oscar Tschirky, who ran the Waldorf's dining rooms from 1893, collected this sort of thing in bulk; his 1896 book runs to hundreds of small preparations that a large hotel kitchen could assemble from what was already on hand, which is exactly why the recipe calls for "cold chicken," "cold ham" and an unspecified "sauce" without further comment.