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Bread (Tablespoonfuls chopped cooked)
2 tablespoonfuls chopped cooked liver 2 tablespoonfuls chopped cooked ham Salt and pepper to taste Boil rice in plenty of boiling salted water, add parsley, mace, and lemon peel. When quite tender strain off water, take out parsley, mace, and lemon, and stir into the rice, liver, Crisco, ham, and seasonings. Cut an even number of slices of bread, spread mixture when cold on one-half, and cover with remaining slices of bread. Trim and cut into diamond shapes.
Sufficient for twenty-sandwiches.
The text as printed has lost the top of its ingredient list — the rice, parsley, mace, lemon peel and Crisco all appear in the method but never get quantities. Treat the following as the working figures for twenty small tea sandwiches.
- The missing quantitiesOnly the liver, ham and seasoning survived the typesetting. For twenty sandwiches, about 2 oz (1/3 cup) raw long-grain rice, a small handful of parsley on the stalk, a blade of mace, a strip of lemon peel and 1 tablespoon of fat will bring the paste to a spreadable consistency. Any figure given for the vanished ingredients is a reconstruction, not the book's own.
- Crisco and substitutesCrisco is hydrogenated vegetable shortening, here doing the job butter would do in any other sandwich paste. Softened butter gives a better flavour and firms up the mixture when chilled; the shortening is in the recipe because the book exists to sell it.
- Mace and lemon peel are aromatics, not ingredientsThe parsley, mace and peel go into the cooking water and are fished out again. A blade of mace is the lacy covering of the nutmeg; a scant 1/4 teaspoon of ground mace stirred into the finished paste is the practical equivalent, since ground mace cannot be strained out.
- Cook the rice soft"Quite tender" means softer than you would serve rice as a side dish — nearly falling apart, so it binds the meat rather than reading as separate grains. Boil it loose in a large pan of salted water and drain well, then let it steam dry for a minute or it will make the bread damp.
- Spread only when coldThe instruction to cool the mixture is the hinge. Warm rice paste soaks straight into the crumb and the sandwiches collapse before you can trim them. Chill the filling thoroughly and butter the bread lightly first as a moisture barrier.
- The liver and hamBoth are already cooked here — this is a use for leftover roast ham and a piece of calf's or chicken liver. Chop them fine or the paste will not spread.
- Cutting into diamondsUse a firm, close-crumbed white sandwich loaf cut thin, trim the crusts after assembling, then cut on the diagonal both ways.
- KeepingThe filling holds two days covered in the refrigerator; the assembled sandwiches hold a few hours at most, under a damp cloth, before the edges harden.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was written by Marion Harris Neil, cookery editor of the Ladies' Home Journal, for Procter & Gamble, who had launched Crisco in 1911 as the first widely marketed hydrogenated vegetable shortening. The book is a recipe collection in service of a product: several hundred dishes, nearly every one of them calling for a spoonful or two of Crisco whether it needs one or not, as this sandwich paste does. The dish itself belongs to the Edwardian tea table, where thin bread, crusts removed and shapes cut with a knife or cutter, was the point as much as the filling — and where a meat paste stretched with rice was a respectable way to use up the end of a roast. Potted and chopped meat sandwiches of this kind ran through English and American cookbooks from the 1880s onward; the mace and lemon peel are older still, a survival of the eighteenth-century potting spices that flavoured preserved meats before refrigeration.