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Chicken Surprise Sandwich
Chop cold boiled chicken and few capers fine; mix with a little mayonnaise dressing and spread between thin slices of toasted white bread. Garnish with an olive.
A minimal filling that depends entirely on the ratio of chicken to dressing and on the bread being cut thin. Two or three details in the original need translating.
- The hinge: bind, don't drown"A little mayonnaise dressing" is deliberate — enough to hold the chopped meat together and no more, or the toast goes soggy before it reaches the table. Start with about a tablespoon of mayonnaise per cup of chopped chicken and add by half-teaspoons.
- Mayonnaise dressingIn period sandwich books the term generally points to a true egg-yolk-and-oil mayonnaise, sometimes thinned with lemon juice, rather than the sweeter boiled dressings also in use at the time, though usage was not consistent. Any good commercial mayonnaise stands in; if you make your own, use pasteurised eggs.
- Cold boiled chicken'Cold boiled' suggests meat left from an earlier meal, though the recipe says no more than that. Poached breast and thigh, or the meat from a supermarket roast chicken, both work — thigh meat gives more flavour against the capers.
- Capers"A few" means a few: roughly a teaspoon of drained, rinsed capers to a cup of chicken. Rinse them, since brine carried over will thin the dressing and oversalt the filling.
- Chop, not processChop with a knife to a coarse mince. A food processor turns cold chicken into paste, which is a different sandwich and not a better one.
- Toasted breadToast, cool on a rack, then fill. Warm toast steams under the filling and the crispness that justifies the toasting is lost within a minute.
- YieldAbout a cup of filling, from roughly half a chicken breast plus a thigh, makes four sandwiches on thin-cut bread — eight halves or sixteen tea-sized fingers with the crusts off.
Sandwich books were a small publishing genre in the early twentieth century, aimed at hostesses arranging afternoon teas, card parties and picnic baskets rather than at cooks feeding a family. The "surprise" in a title of this kind may point to a hidden element — here, presumably, the capers, whose sharpness is not visible in the pale chopped filling. The whole formula is thrift dressed up as elegance: cold boiled fowl left from an earlier dinner, a spoonful of mayonnaise, and a single olive laid on the plate to make it presentable. Capers reached American pantries as imported jarred goods, and olives were sold jarred as well, though by this period a domestic California olive industry was also supplying them.