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Cannibal Sandwich
Chop raw beef and onions very fine, season with salt and pepper, and spread on lightly buttered brown bread.
This is raw beef, chopped and served without any heat step at all. The hazard is not theoretical, and it is the reason this page carries a caution rather than a set of conversions.
- No kill stepNothing in the method brings the beef above room temperature. Every pathogen present on the meat when it is chopped is present in the sandwich when it is eaten.
- Chopping spreads surface bacteriaOn an intact steak, contamination sits on the outside and is destroyed by searing. Chopping or grinding distributes that surface throughout the mass, which is precisely why ground beef is treated differently from whole cuts.
- E. coli O157:H7This organism was not identified until 1982, decades after the book was published, and it was not on the author's horizon. An infectious dose can be very small, and in children and older adults it can lead to hemolytic uremic syndrome and kidney failure.
- Salmonella and ListeriaRaw beef can carry these as well. Salt, pepper and raw onion do nothing to reduce them, and if the sandwich is left standing at room temperature on a buffet the conditions are worse still.
- "Fresh from a trusted butcher" is not a controlThe traditional defence is meat ground to order that same day. Freshness governs spoilage, not pathogens; a perfectly fresh carcass can carry O157:H7 from the hide at slaughter.
- If you want the dishSteak tartare exists in restaurants under specific sourcing and handling controls that a home kitchen cannot replicate. Follow current published guidance rather than this text.
Eva Greene Fuller's Up-to-Date Sandwich Book appeared in 1909, when raw seasoned beef was unremarkable on an American table. The name is period slang. It survives most stubbornly in Wisconsin and the upper Midwest, where German and, by some accounts, Belgian settlement is credited with a tradition of raw ground beef with onion on rye or dark bread, eaten at holidays and often called cannibal sandwich or tiger meat; state health authorities there still issue warnings about it every December. The recipe is a single sentence, with no note on the meat's source or handling.