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Sandwich Fillings
Minced ham with cream or salad dressing.
Left-over meat, minced, with cream or salad dressing. Dried beef, plain or frizzled.
Slices of beef, ham, chicken, lamb, sprinkled with salt or spread with a little salad dressing.
Broiled sliced bacon.
Tuna fish or salmon, plain or mixed with salad dressing. Sardines, minced, with lemon juice added.
EGG Hard cooked, chopped and mixed with salad dressing.
Scrambled, plain or in milk, or with bits of chopped bacon.
This is a list of formulas rather than a single recipe: each line is a filling, bound and seasoned to taste. A few of the terms and assumptions need translating.
- "Salad dressing" is not bottled dressingIn a book of this vintage the phrase means either mayonnaise or a cooked (boiled) dressing thickened with egg and flour and sharpened with vinegar. Modern bottled vinaigrette will soak the bread; use mayonnaise or a thick cooked dressing.
- Cream as a binder"Minced ham with cream" means a spoonful or two of heavy cream worked into finely chopped ham until it holds together, not a pourable mixture. Cream carries salt-cured meat well but keeps badly at room temperature, so mayonnaise is the more practical binder for a packed lunch.
- Dried beef and "frizzled"Dried beef is salt-cured chipped beef, sold in jars or thin packets. It is aggressively salty; a brief rinse and pat dry helps. To frizzle it, tear it up and toss in a little butter in a hot pan until the edges curl and brown, then cool before it goes near bread.
- AmountsThe original gives none. Roughly 1/4 cup of a bound filling, or 2 to 3 oz of sliced meat, fills a two-slice sandwich; two hard-cooked eggs with about 2 tablespoons of mayonnaise make two sandwiches.
- Tinned fish has changedTuna of the period was generally oil-packed, and canned salmon was packed in its own liquor with salt added; both were saltier than most tins today. Oil-packed still gives the richer filling, but drain it hard; water-packed will need more mayonnaise. For the sardines, mash them with the bones in and add lemon juice a few drops at a time until the mixture is bright but not wet.
- Keep the bread dryButter both slices to the edges before filling. It seals the crumb against a moist filling, which matters when the sandwich is made at seven and eaten at noon.
- The lunch box itselfThese fillings are all perishable: mayonnaise-bound meat, egg, scrambled egg, bacon. Current practice is no more than two hours unrefrigerated, so pack them with an ice pack in an insulated bag.
- Cook the bacon and eggs fullyBroiled bacon should be crisp, not limp, and scrambled egg for a sandwich wants to be set firm rather than soft and creamy. Loose curds weep into the bread and, in a lunch held at room temperature, undercooked egg is the weakest item on the list.
The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company distributed cook books and health pamphlets free to its policyholders from the early twentieth century onward, part of a broader welfare-and-education effort that also sent visiting nurses into subscribers' homes; the aim was frankly actuarial, since healthier policyholders lived longer. A list of packed-lunch fillings belongs squarely to that project: by the 1910s and 1920s a great many wage earners and schoolchildren carried a cold midday meal, and reformers worried about what was in it. Hence a list of fillings built almost entirely on the previous night's leftovers, tinned fish and eggs, all of them cheap, protein-heavy and portable, with the ubiquitous "salad dressing" doing the work of holding the scraps together. The sandwich itself had been respectable American lunch food for decades by then, but its promotion as a balanced, planned meal rather than a scrap of bread and meat is characteristic of this era of domestic-science writing.