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Parsley (Brown bread Put through food)
Brown bread Put through food chopper cooked meat, olives, capers, and yolks of hard cooked eggs, then add Crisco and seasonings. Spread mixture on slices of buttered brown bread, and stamp them out with a round cutter; sprinkle surfaces of sandwiches with chopped whites of eggs. Dish up in circular fashion. Put lettuce in center with shrimps and a few sprigs of parsley. This sandwich quite repays the trouble of making. Sufficient for twenty sandwiches.
A grinder sandwich filling of the kind that filled tea tables before the food processor. The original gives no quantities at all, so treat it as a ratio exercise rather than a formula.
- Proportions, since none are givenFor twenty small rounds, work from roughly 1 cup finely ground cooked meat, 1/4 cup olives, 1 tablespoon capers and the yolks of 3 hard-cooked eggs. Add fat a tablespoon at a time until the mixture just holds together when pressed.
- The CriscoCrisco here is a binder, taking the place of butter or mayonnaise. Solid vegetable shortening is unpleasant at room temperature in an uncooked spread; softened butter or a spoonful of mayonnaise does the same job and tastes better.
- Food chopperA hand-cranked meat grinder. A food processor pulsed in short bursts is the equivalent, but stop while the mixture still has texture -- run it through and you get paste.
- Brown breadHere brown bread is almost certainly a wholemeal sandwich loaf rather than the steamed molasses-and-cornmeal Boston brown bread; stamping rounds from slices implies a square-cut loaf. Use a close-crumbed wholemeal loaf, sliced thin, or the rounds will crumble under the cutter.
- Cutting roundsStamping circles from square slices wastes roughly a fifth of each slice, more if the rounds are small. Cut the rounds before spreading, and press them from slightly stale bread; fresh slices compress and tear.
- SeasoningsOlives and capers already bring salt, so season at the end. A little of the caper brine or a spot of mustard lifts the filling more than added salt does.
- Shrimps and lettuceThe shrimp and lettuce are garnish for the serving plate, not filling. Use small cooked shrimp, and put them on at the last minute.
- Yield and holdingTwenty small rounds, enough for six to eight people at tea. The filling keeps a day covered in the refrigerator; assembled sandwiches go soggy within a couple of hours, so butter the bread right to the edge and assemble close to serving.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was written by Marion Harris Neil, cookery editor of the Ladies' Home Journal, as a book-length argument for Procter & Gamble's new hydrogenated cottonseed shortening -- a product with no culinary tradition behind it and therefore in need of one. That explains the odd appearance of Crisco in an uncooked sandwich spread, where a period cook would simply have used butter: the book works the ingredient into every category it can reach. The sandwich itself belongs to the elaborate afternoon-tea style of the 1900s, when the food chopper turned out smooth ground fillings and hostesses cut bread into rounds, crescents and diamonds.