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Lamb Sandwich No. 2
Chop cold cooked lamb and a green pepper fine.
Season with salt and add a dash of mayonnaise dressing. Spread on thin slices of graham bread lightly buttered. Put the two slices together.
A leftover-roast sandwich with almost no fixed quantities, which is the point: the proportions follow whatever lamb you have. A few notes on the ingredients and the assembly.
- ProportionsFigure roughly one small green bell pepper, seeded, to two cups of chopped lamb, and mayonnaise a spoonful at a time until the mixture just holds together. Too much dressing and it soaks the bread before you sit down.
- Green pepperIn 1909 this means a fresh unripe sweet bell pepper, not a chile. Chop it very fine and blot it on a towel, or its water will thin the mayonnaise.
- Graham breadA coarse whole-wheat loaf made with unsifted graham flour, slightly sweet and denser than white sandwich bread. Any decent whole-wheat sandwich loaf stands in; a seeded multigrain does not, as the seeds fight the soft filling.
- Cold cooked lambLeftover roast leg or shoulder, trimmed of gristle and the harder fat, which does not soften in a cold sandwich. Chop with a knife rather than a food processor, which turns cooked lamb to paste.
- Mayonnaise dressingPeriod mayonnaise was generally made fresh with raw yolk and did not keep long. Commercial jarred mayonnaise is the sensible substitute here.
- ButteringThe thin film of butter is not seasoning, it is waterproofing between the damp filling and the crumb. Have the butter soft enough to spread without tearing the bread.
- Yield and holdingTwo cups of filling makes about four sandwiches. Assembled, they keep an hour or two wrapped and chilled; beyond that the pepper weeps.
The Up-to-Date Sandwich Book belongs to a wave of early twentieth-century American cookery writing built around the sandwich as a respectable dish in its own right, suitable for luncheons, teas and picnics rather than merely a workman's dinner pail. Recipes like this one are frankly leftover management: a Sunday leg of lamb produced cold meat for days, and chopping it with a seasoning and a binder was one common way to make the third day's serving palatable. The graham bread is a mark of the period too, graham flour having entered American kitchens through the dietary reform preaching of Sylvester Graham in the 1830s and settling by 1900 into an ordinary, slightly wholesome-seeming loaf. Green peppers appear repeatedly in sandwich books of these years, valued for crunch and color.