No. 815

Sandwiches of Different Meats

Sandwichs de Viandes Variees

Use roast beef or roast tenderloins, cut the bread in quarter inch thick slices, coat one side with a layer of butter prepared with English mustard and on these lay the meats; cover with another slice of buttered bread, pare and dress on napkins. The roast beef may be replaced by beef tongue or lamb, corned beef, chopped raw lean beef, veal, grated ham or foies-gras. Grated horseradish can be strewn over the butter if liked.

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For the Modern Kitchen Do not make this as written.

Ranhofer gives a template rather than a fixed recipe: thin bread, a seasoned butter, cold roast meat, trimmed square. The details worth knowing are mostly in the vocabulary.

Mustard butter"Butter prepared with English mustard" means softened butter creamed with dry English mustard powder or made-up English mustard, roughly a teaspoon to four tablespoons of butter, to taste. It is spread on the bread rather than the mustard being spread separately, which keeps the crumb from going damp.
"Pare and dress"Pare means trim the crusts flush with a sharp knife after the sandwich is assembled. Dressing on napkins is service language: the sandwiches are arranged on a folded linen napkin on the platter for presentation.
Quarter-inch breadThat is thinner than most sliced loaves today. A firm white pullman loaf cut by hand, or a machine-sliced sandwich loaf rolled once with a pin, gets you close. The point is that bread should be a wrapper, not a component.
Foies-grasRanhofer means the whole cooked liver or a terrine of it, sliced thin, not the mousse sold in tubes. Any smooth duck or goose liver terrine works; the mustard butter should be dropped or halved with plain butter, since English mustard overwhelms it.
Grated hamThe recipe calls for the ham to be grated rather than sliced, which turns a dry cured leg into something that can be spread; a little of the butter would bind it. A food processor pulsed briefly does the same job.
The raw beef option"Chopped raw lean beef" is a period tartare-style filling. Raw ground or hand-chopped beef carries a genuine risk of E. coli and salmonella that nineteenth-century kitchens did not account for; if you want it, follow current guidance on raw-beef preparation rather than this line. The cooked variants are unaffected.
Yield and holdingTwo slices of bread per sandwich, cut into four fingers, gives roughly a dozen pieces from six slices. Assemble no more than an hour ahead, cover with a damp cloth and refrigerate; the butter layer helps keep the bread from going damp.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer wrote The Epicurean (1894) out of some thirty years running the kitchen at Delmonico's in New York, and this entry sits in a run of sandwich numbers aimed squarely at the buffet, the ball supper and the late collation rather than the dinner table. The sandwich as a service item was well established in American hotel and club cooking by then, and Ranhofer's treatment is characteristically systematic: one method, then a list of interchangeable fillings, so a kitchen could turn out variety from whatever cold roasts the larder held. The instruction to dress them on napkins is the tell that these were passed or displayed, part of the same cold-side-dish repertoire as the galantines and aspics around them. English mustard worked into butter, and the optional grated horseradish, are the standard nineteenth-century answers to the problem of cold beef, which needs heat of some kind to read as seasoned at all.