Game Sandwich
On thin slices of lightly buttered bread, place slices of breast of roasted partridge; spread lightly with currant jelly and cover with another buttered slice of bread. Garnish with cress.
A cold-larder sandwich built on leftover roast game, and the proportions matter more than the method: the bread should be thin enough that the meat, not the crumb, is what you taste.
- The birdWild partridge breast is lean, close-grained and dry; slice it thinly across the grain or it eats stringy. Farmed partridge and quail are often available frozen from game dealers, and roast pheasant, grouse or squab breast all work in the same register. Roast chicken will do at a pinch, though it is milder than the bird the recipe assumes.
- DonenessGame breast for slicing wants to be cooked through but no further; modern guidance for poultry and game birds is 165F, then rested and chilled before carving. Overcooked partridge goes to sawdust and no amount of butter will rescue it in a sandwich.
- Currant jellyThis means red currant jelly, the standard English sweet-sharp accompaniment to game, not black currant preserve or jam. If unavailable, a firm-set redcurrant or lingonberry jelly gives the same tart lift; loose jam will soak the bread.
- "Lightly buttered"The butter is structural as much as flavouring — a thin sealing film on the cut face keeps the jelly from wetting the crumb. Butter both slices and let it be soft enough to spread without tearing thin bread.
- BreadThe recipe specifies only thin slices; a tight-crumbed white sandwich loaf suits it. Trimming the crusts and cutting into fingers or triangles is a common treatment for sandwiches of this kind, though the recipe does not say so.
- CressGarden cress or watercress, used as a plate garnish here rather than a filling. A few sprigs tucked inside adds pepper and is a reasonable liberty.
- Yield and timingPartridge is a small bird, so scale the number of sandwiches to the meat you actually have. Assemble within an hour of serving and keep covered and cool; there is nothing here to hold the bread together once it softens.
Sandwiches of this kind belong to the shooting-season economy of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when a household that roasted game had cold breast meat to use up and a tea table or picnic hamper to fill. Red currant jelly with game is an old and settled English pairing -- the sweet acidity cuts the mineral flavour of wild birds -- and it carried over into American cookbooks of the period, where partridge, grouse and quail appear regularly in game chapters. Compendia of this sort tend to catalogue fillings in the same brief form, on the assumption that the reader already had the roast, the buttered bread and the jelly pot, and needed only the combination.