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Chicken Sandwich No. 4
One cup of cold boiled chicken chopped fine; season with salt and paprika, moisten with a little cream, paste between thin slices of lightly buttered whole wheat bread.
A plain chicken salad filling with cream instead of mayonnaise. The whole point is texture, so the two things worth controlling are how fine the chop is and how much cream goes in.
- "Paste" is the instruction that mattersThe chicken should be chopped and moistened until it holds together as a spreadable paste, not tossed like a salad. Chunky filling pushes the thin bread apart when you cut the sandwich.
- How much cream"A little" is about 1 to 2 tablespoons of heavy cream per cup of chopped chicken. Add it a spoonful at a time; too much and the bread turns damp within the hour.
- YieldOne cup of filling makes roughly four sandwiches on standard sliced bread, or about sixteen small tea-sized triangles with the crusts off.
- Cold boiled chickenThe recipe specifies only cold boiled chicken, without saying which parts; poached breast and thigh both suit it. Leftover roast chicken works and tastes better; rotisserie chicken is saltier, so hold back on the salt until you have tasted it.
- PaprikaIn sandwich books of this period paprika generally meant the mild sweet sort, used as much for colour as for heat. Smoked paprika will dominate the cream and chicken entirely.
- ChoppingA knife on a board gives you control over how fine the chop goes. A food processor turns boiled chicken into a pale purée in a few seconds, so pulse it briefly if you use one.
- ButteringThe recipe calls for lightly buttered bread. Buttering to the edges helps keep the cream from soaking into the crumb.
- Make-aheadThe filling keeps a day, covered, in the refrigerator. Assemble no more than an hour or two ahead and keep the sandwiches wrapped and chilled.
Sandwich books were a small publishing genre in the first decades of the twentieth century, arriving with sliced sandwich loaves, afternoon tea, the packed lunch and the club luncheon. They tend to be organised by filling and numbered rather than named, which is why a collection can run to Chicken Sandwich No. 4 without embarrassment: the reader was expected to want variations, not recipes. Cream rather than mayonnaise as the binder is one period option among several -- home-made mayonnaise and boiled dressings are also common in these books -- and commercially jarred mayonnaise did not become an American pantry staple until roughly the 1910s and 1920s. Brown bread carried a mild reputation for healthfulness in this era, which may be behind the specification of whole wheat here.