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Hotel Club Sandwiches
Cut the bread about one-half inch in thickness.
Toast it a delicate brown, and butter it slightly.
Lay thin slices of chicken on the toast, then a crisp leaf of lettuce, a few strips of very thin broiled bacon, and a little mayonnaise dressing (see page 74). Cover with another slice of toast, and serve at once.
A Scallop of Chicken with Celery Cook one cup of celery, cut in inch pieces, in boiling slightly salted water, until tender. Save the water to make sauce. There should be one cup. Slice thin two cups of cold chicken, discarding all skin, season with salt and pepper, and moisten with a little left-over gravy. Melt two tablespoonfuls of butter, stir in two tablespoonfuls of flour, and when bubbling add slowly one cup of celery water, one-half cup of milk, one-quarter teaspoonful of salt, and a little pepper. When thickened and smooth, stir in the cooked celery. Put a few buttered crumbs in a baking-dish and arrange the chicken and sauce in alternate layers. Cover with well-buttered crumbs. Brown in a hot oven.
Two recipes run together here: the club sandwich, and a scalloped chicken that reuses the same cold bird. Both assume a cook with yesterday's roast and its gravy on hand.
- The hinge: assemble and eat immediatelyToast, bacon and mayonnaise all lose their point within minutes. Have the chicken sliced, the bacon cooked and the lettuce dry before the bread goes in the toaster.
- Two slices, not threeThe recipe closes the sandwich with a single second slice, the two-slice form found in many early club sandwich recipes rather than the later three-decker with a middle layer. The bread is cut a generous half inch, which stands up better to mayonnaise than a thin slice.
- "Very thin broiled bacon"Broiled here means cooked under direct heat until crisp, not merely warmed. Supermarket bacon is often cut thicker than this implies; a thin-cut streaky bacon holds the sandwich together better.
- Mayonnaise dressingThe cross-reference is to a mayonnaise made from scratch in the book, in this period almost certainly with raw egg. Commercial mayonnaise, or one built on pasteurised eggs, does the same job here.
- "A hot oven"No temperature is given; a hot oven of this period is roughly 400-450F. The scallop only needs the crumbs browned and the sauce bubbling -- everything in the dish is already cooked -- so watch it rather than trusting a fixed time.
- The celery water is the pointDo not drain it away. It carries most of the celery flavour and replaces stock in the sauce; if you lose it, use chicken stock rather than plain water.
- Left-over gravyIf there is none, moisten the chicken with a few spoonfuls of stock instead. Cold roast poultry dries badly in the oven without it.
- Buttered crumbsToss fresh breadcrumbs with melted butter until each crumb is coated, about a tablespoon of butter to half a cup of crumbs. Dry unbuttered crumbs scorch before they brown evenly.
- YieldNo yield is given. Two cups of chicken with the sauce and crumbs will stretch to about three or four servings; the sandwich is written per person.
The club sandwich is generally traced to American clubhouses and hotel dining rooms of the 1890s, which may be why it arrives here labelled "Hotel" and given without much explanation: readers were presumed to know it from eating out. The scallop beside it is the older idea by far, a dish of cooked meat layered with sauce and buttered crumbs and browned, a technique that let a cook stretch cold poultry into a hot supper without the appearance of leftovers on the table.