Home › The World's Kitchen › Veal Club Sandwiches
Veal Club Sandwiches
Prepare veal club sandwiches same as lamb, using same quantity veal in place of lamb.
A one-line variant that leans entirely on the lamb club sandwich printed alongside it. What follows fills in the assumptions a 1906 cook would have made without being told.
- Read the lamb entry firstThis recipe supplies no quantities, no bread, no seasoning — only the swap. Everything structural comes from the lamb club sandwich recipe it refers back to, and the veal is a straight one-for-one replacement by the same quantity.
- What the veal actually isMost likely cooked veal, sliced thin; the recipe itself does not specify, so this is an inference from the sandwich form rather than an instruction. Veal cooked to order for the purpose will be juicier but less easy to slice cleanly.
- Slicing matters more than with lambVeal is leaner and blander than cold lamb and turns dry and cottony in thick slabs. Cut it as thin as the knife allows, across the grain, and lay two or three light layers rather than one heavy one.
- Club sandwich, 1906 senseAround this date a club sandwich generally involved toast, a meat, and commonly bacon, lettuce and mayonnaise, sometimes built in three layers of toast and cut into sections; practice varied from source to source. None of this is specified here — it would have come from the lamb recipe.
- Season itVeal needs help that lamb does not. Salt and pepper the meat itself before it goes on the toast, and be generous with the mayonnaise; this recipe gives no seasoning direction of its own.
- YieldOne sandwich per person as a luncheon dish. Any quantity of meat has to be taken from the lamb recipe, since this entry gives none.
The club sandwich appears in American cookbooks from the 1890s onward and its name is generally traced to the men's clubs and club cars of the northeastern United States, though no single origin is documented and several competing claims circulate. The book is generally attributed to Alexander Filippini, who is said to have worked for decades at Delmonico's in New York, and the method here is characteristic of a professional kitchen writing for other cooks: establish a form once, then run variations off it with a single line apiece. Veal was far more common on American tables then than now, and cold roast veal was a familiar item.