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Chicken and Egg Sandwich
One cupful of cold chicken chopped fine; the yolks of two hard-boiled eggs chopped fine; one teaspoonful of melted butter, one teaspoonful of lemon juice, one teaspoonful of rich stock, and salt and pepper to taste. Mix to a paste and spread on thin slices of lightly buttered white bread. Garnish with an olive.
A straightforward chicken salad filling bound with butter and stock rather than mayonnaise. The whole thing hinges on how finely the chicken is cut and how well the paste holds together.
- Chop, don't shred"Chopped fine" means fine enough to bind into a spreadable paste — closer to a mince than pulled meat. A few pulses in a food processor works, but stop before it turns to mush.
- Rich stockIn period usage this meant reduced, gelatinous homemade chicken stock that sets to jelly when cold. A teaspoon of commercial broth adds liquid but little body; reduce a few tablespoons of good stock down hard, or use a teaspoon of the jelly from under roast chicken drippings.
- The egg yolks onlyThe recipe calls for yolks alone; whites stay rubbery and do not blend into a paste, which is the likely reason. Save them for a garnish or another sandwich.
- Butter temperatureMix while the butter is still liquid and the chicken is cool, so it coats the meat evenly rather than seizing into lumps.
- SeasoningCold chicken and boiled yolk both need more salt than seems reasonable. Season, taste, and season again after the paste has sat, since chilling mutes it.
- YieldOne cup of chicken makes roughly four rounds of sandwiches, or a dozen small tea-sized triangles with crusts removed.
- The oliveA period garnish, speared on top or set alongside. A brined green olive is the likeliest intention, though the recipe does not specify; a little of the brine can also sharpen the paste itself.
Sandwich books proliferated in America between roughly 1890 and 1920, when the sandwich moved from workingmen's dinner pails to the afternoon tea table and the ladies' luncheon. Fillings like this one — cold cooked meat pounded or chopped to a paste, bound with butter, moistened with stock or cream, spread thin on crustless white bread — are the direct descendants of the potted meats of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, where butter was the preservative as well as the binder. The recipe also reflects a practical economy: it is a way to use up the last cup of a roast bird. The instruction to garnish with an olive marks it as a company dish rather than a lunchbox one; olives were a fashionable relish in this period, and they appear often enough in American recipe books of the era that they seem to have carried some suggestion of refinement.