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Chicken Sandwich No. 3
Chop cold cooked chicken fine; season with pepper and salt, add a dash of mayonnaise dressing, spread on thinly cut slices of buttered white bread, with a lettuce leaf between, and garnish with an olive.
A plain chopped chicken sandwich of the tea-table sort, written for cooks who already had leftover roast fowl on hand. Two things decide whether it is good: how fine the chicken is chopped and how little dressing you add.
- "A dash" of mayonnaiseAim for about 1 tablespoon of mayonnaise per cup of chopped chicken — just enough to bind. The instruction to use only "a dash" suggests a filling far drier than modern chicken salad, which makes sense given that a wet filling soaks thin white bread within minutes.
- Chop, do not shredHand-chop on a board to a fine, even mince rather than pulling the meat into strands. Fine chopping is what lets the filling spread in a thin layer and hold together when the crusts are trimmed. A food processor turns it to paste in seconds, so pulse sparingly if you use one.
- Cold cooked chickenPoached or roasted breast and thigh both work; a mix of the two has more flavor. Meat pulled from a rotisserie bird is fine, but taste before salting, since it is already well seasoned.
- Butter both slicesThe butter is structural, not decorative — it seals the crumb against the moisture in the filling. Have it soft enough to spread without tearing the bread, and cover the slice right to the edges.
- BreadThe recipe specifies only "thinly cut" white bread; a close-crumbed sandwich loaf at roughly 1/4 inch, thinner than a standard commercial slice, suits it. Day-old bread cuts far more cleanly than fresh.
- The lettuce leafUse a crisp inner leaf trimmed to the size of the bread; a large ruffled outer leaf makes the sandwich impossible to bite cleanly. Dry it thoroughly, or it will undo the buttering.
- Garnish and yieldThe recipe says only to garnish with an olive; set it alongside on the plate or spear it to the top. One cup of chopped chicken fills about four sandwiches, which cut into eight to sixteen tea-sized pieces.
- TimingAssemble no more than an hour ahead, cover with a barely damp towel, and refrigerate. Chicken bound with mayonnaise should not sit at room temperature for a long buffet.
Sandwich books were a small publishing genre in the first decade of the twentieth century, when afternoon tea, card parties, and packed luncheons all called for something small, tidy, and eaten with the fingers. Eva Greene Fuller's collection is organized the way a cook actually works — by what is in the larder — so the meat section runs through dozens of numbered variations on the same few cold roasts, each differing only in the dressing, the herb, or the garnish. That numbering is the tell: this is not a dish with a history so much as a template for using up yesterday's fowl, which in 1909 was an expensive bird. Commercially bottled mayonnaise seems to have been spreading through American groceries only gradually and unevenly around this date, so the "mayonnaise dressing" a reader of this book made was in all likelihood whisked at home from egg yolk and oil.