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Chicken and Ham Sandwiches
Remove the crusts from thin slices of bread and spread over thinly with butter. Lay some slices of cold chicken on the buttered sides of the bread, and over these very thin slices of ham, adding a little salt and mustard to taste. Lay a slice of bread, with the buttered side downwards, over each, press them gently together, trim and cut the sandwiches into oblong pieces. Garnish with fresh parsley and serve on a napkin spread on a dish.
A club-and-tea-room sandwich from a hotel kitchen that made them by the hundred. The whole thing turns on how thinly everything is cut.
- The hinge: thin means thinThe bread, the butter, the chicken and especially the ham should all be sliced fine enough that the sandwich compresses to something you can eat without unhinging your jaw. Ham shaved on a slicer, chicken breast carved across the grain.
- Cold chickenThis is a leftover recipe in disguise, written for the carcass of a roast or poached bird. Poached breast works, but roast meat with a little of its skin has more flavour; avoid deli chicken roll, which is too wet and will grey the bread.
- MustardThe recipe says only "a little" mustard and does not name a type. Mustard of the period was commonly made up from powder and is hotter than a modern yellow squeeze mustard, so use it sparingly, or work a scant teaspoon into the softened butter instead of dabbing it on.
- Butter the bread to the edgesThe butter here is doing structural work, sealing the crumb against moisture from the meat. Soften it to spreading consistency first rather than fighting cold butter through thin slices.
- Trim after assembly, not beforeCrusts come off, then the sandwich is built, pressed, and only then cut into oblongs A serrated knife wiped between cuts gives clean edges.
- Yield and holdingTwo slices of bread give three or four oblong fingers; figure three or four fingers per person for tea, more for a lunch. Assembled sandwiches keep an hour or two under a barely damp cloth in the refrigerator, but they turn leathery by the next day.
- The napkinServing on a folded napkin spread over the dish was standard hotel practice: it absorbs condensation and keeps the sandwiches from sliding. A linen napkin on a platter still does the job.
Oscar Tschirky was the Waldorf's maître d'hôtel, and later the Waldorf-Astoria's, from the 1890s onward, and his 1896 Cook Book — though he was not himself the cook — collected the enormous working repertoire of a hotel that fed New York society at all hours. Sandwiches seem to occupy a fair amount of space in it, presumably because the hotel served them constantly — at the theatre supper, on the tea tray, at the buffet, in the rooms — and they were expected to be built to a standard: crusts off, butter to the edges, cut in neat fingers. Chicken and ham together is often said to be an old British pairing, familiar from raised pies and from the cold larder of a country house, and it may have travelled easily into American hotel service because both meats were already on hand cold. The instruction to serve on a napkin spread on a dish marks the period as clearly as anything in the text: it is the language of a formal service brigade, not a home kitchen.