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Minced Meat on Toast
Use any meat, heating in gravy, white sauce, or tomato sauce. Add butter, season well, and serve on hot toast. 1 to 2 cups chopped meat 2 cups cubed potato 1 teaspoon salt
A two-line formula for using up cooked meat, written in the telegraphic style of the Metropolitan's free pamphlets. The ingredient list and the method do not quite agree, so read both before you start.
- The potato is unexplainedThe method never mentions the 2 cups of cubed potato in the ingredient list. Either fold it into the sauce with the meat, which makes a heartier hash-like mixture that will stretch to more servings, or leave it out entirely and treat the dish as meat in sauce on toast. Both readings are defensible.
- Sauce quantityNo amount of gravy or sauce is given. Figure about 1 cup of medium white sauce or gravy per 1 to 2 cups of meat: enough to bind and coat, not enough to soak the toast through before it reaches the table.
- The hinge: the meat is already cookedBring the sauce to a simmer first, then add the meat and heat it just through, two or three minutes. Cooked beef, lamb or chicken simmered any longer turns dry and stringy no matter how much sauce surrounds it.
- SaltA teaspoon of salt covers the potato as well as the meat, and gravy or canned tomato sauce is already seasoned. If you leave the potato out, start with half, taste, and adjust. A little mustard, Worcestershire or grated onion improves it.
- ButterStir it in off the heat, a tablespoon or two, so it emulsifies into the sauce rather than separating into an oily film.
- Left-over meat and food safetyThe recipe reads as a way of using already-cooked meat, though it does not say so outright. Use meat that has been refrigerated no more than three or four days, and heat the finished mixture to a full simmer throughout rather than merely warming it.
- ToastThick-cut bread, toasted hard and dry on both sides, holds up better than soft sandwich slices. Butter it or not as you like; the sauce will do the work.
- YieldServes two to three as a light supper with the meat alone, three to four if the potato is included.
The Metropolitan Cook Book was not a commercial cookbook but an advertisement of sorts: Metropolitan Life Insurance Company gave it away by the millions to policyholders through its visiting nurses and agents, part of a broad early twentieth-century campaign in which insurers promoted household health and thrift on the theory that healthier policyholders lived longer. That purpose explains the compression here. The book was meant to be handed to a household cook who already knew how to make white sauce and needed only a reminder of what to do with Sunday's roast on Tuesday. Dishes of chopped meat reheated in sauce and served over toast were the backbone of American left-over cookery before home refrigeration was widespread, when cooked meat had to be used up quickly and toast supplied the cheapest possible base. The same idea appears across the period under many names -- creamed chicken, minced beef, hash on toast -- and survives most visibly in the military's creamed chipped beef.