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Savory Sandwiches
Take some cold cooked ham, or corned beef or tongue, having one-fourth of its quantity fat; chop it up very finely, and mix with it one teaspoonful of mustard, one saltspoonful of salt, and sufficient cold water to form a stiff paste. Then add one-half teacupful of butter worked to a cream. Take some very thin slices of stale bread, spread them over with the paste, put two slices together, having the paste inside, cut into shapes or rectangular pieces, and serve.
A potted-meat spread of the sort that filled tea sandwiches and picnic baskets before commercial sandwich pastes existed. The only real technique here is getting the meat fine enough that the paste spreads without tearing thin bread.
- SaltspoonfulA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. Given that ham, corned beef and tongue are all cured and already salty, taste before adding it at all.
- Half a teacupful of butterTeacup measures varied; a teacupful was reckoned anywhere from about four to six ounces, so half is somewhere between 4 and 6 tablespoons. That is a great deal of butter, since the recipe never says how much meat you are starting with. Start with 3 tablespoons, softened and beaten smooth, and add more only if the paste is still stiff.
- Which mustardOscar does not say. A teaspoon of prepared mustard is the safer reading for a spread of this size; a full teaspoon of dry English mustard powder will dominate everything.
- The fat mattersThe instruction to include one-fourth fat is not padding — it is what makes the paste bind and stay spreadable when chilled. Trimming the ham lean gives a dry, crumbly filling.
- Chop, or use a processorThe original assumes hand-chopping to a near-paste. A food processor does it in seconds, but pulse rather than run it, or the meat turns to gum. Add the water in small amounts with the machine off.
- Stale bread on purposeDay-old bread slices thinner and takes a spread without shredding. Fresh soft sandwich bread will drag and tear.
- Yield and holdingThe yield depends entirely on how much cold meat you start with, since the recipe does not say. It keeps two or three days covered in the refrigerator; bring back to room temperature before spreading or it will pull the bread apart.
Oscar Tschirky ran the dining rooms of the Waldorf and then the Waldorf-Astoria from 1893, and his 1896 Cook Book collected both hotel cookery and the kind of domestic economy his readers expected — this is squarely the latter. Chopped-meat pastes were the standard use for the cold end of a joint in the days before refrigeration made leftovers keep well, and the pounded-meat-and-butter formula is closely related to English potted meats, which used a butter seal to preserve the contents. What is modern here is the sandwich itself: thin bread, crusts implied gone, cut "into shapes" for the tea table and the afternoon reception, a fashion generally traced to the English tea service that American hostesses took up enthusiastically in the 1880s and 1890s.