Picnic Sandwich
A pound of raw beef run through the meat chopper; a teacupful of bread crumbs, pepper and salt to taste; mix with a well-beaten egg, and form into a roll. Take a flank of mutton, remove the bones and lay the above mixture on the mutton and do it up into a roll; bind it with a tape. Sew up the ends so mixture will not bulge out; dust with pepper and salt, then roast it; when it is cold, take off the tape, take out the sewing, and slice thin. Place between thin slices of lightly buttered white bread. Garnish with an olive.
This is a stuffed and rolled meat roast — a galantine in all but name — cooked a day ahead so it slices cleanly for sandwiches. The original gives no oven temperature or time, so the numbers below are the working part.
- The hinge: cook to temperature, not by eyeThe filling is raw ground beef bound with egg and sealed inside a roll, so it must reach 160F at the centre on an instant-read thermometer. A boned lamb breast rolled around a pound of forcemeat comes to roughly 3 to 3.5 lb and takes about 1.5 to 2 hours at 325F, but the thermometer decides.
- "Flank of mutton"Not modern beef flank steak. This is the boned breast or flank of a sheep — a thin, fatty sheet of meat about 2 to 2.5 lb. Ask a butcher for a boned lamb breast; true mutton is rare in the United States and much stronger in flavour.
- A teacupfulRead it as roughly 1/2 to 3/4 cup of dry breadcrumbs; period teacups were not standardised and run smaller than a modern mug.
- Tape and sewingButcher's twine at 1-inch intervals replaces the tape. Rather than sewing the ends, fold the flap of the breast over the filling and tie the ends closed; a trussing needle and twine will do if the roll is loose.
- Roast on a rackLamb breast renders a great deal of fat. Set the roll on a rack over a pan so it browns rather than fries, and pour off the fat once or twice.
- Chilling is what makes it sliceableCool the roll, then refrigerate it overnight wrapped tight, ideally with a light weight on top. Warm, it crumbles; cold and compressed, it cuts into clean 1/8-inch rounds. Keep it refrigerated and use within three days.
- YieldA roll this size gives 20 to 24 thin slices, enough for about ten to twelve sandwiches on a firm white sandwich loaf. Butter both slices thinly to keep the bread from going damp in a picnic basket.
Eva Greene Fuller's Up-to-Date Sandwich Book (1909) belongs to a wave of American cookery published for the new fashion of the packed lunch, the motor outing and the afternoon tea table, and its meat chapter leans hard on cold roasts sliced thin. This particular filling-inside-a-boned-joint is a domestic English relative of the French galantine or ballotine, though a looser one, since the roll is roasted rather than poached: a cheap fatty cut is boned, stuffed with forcemeat, rolled, tied, cooked, then pressed cold so it slices without falling apart. Whatever the recorded motive, the technique had the effect of stretching a pound of beef and a mutton flank across a large party, and it travelled — a chilled, bound roll keeps its shape in a hamper where a joint on the bone will not. The olive garnish is of its moment too: olives were fashionable in American cookery of the period.