Pork Sandwich
Chop cold boiled pork and a celery stalk fine; season with salt, add a dash of Worcestershire, slightly diluted with water; mix and place between thin slices of buttered white bread.
A leftovers sandwich from the era when a boiled pork joint was a weekly fixture. The spread lives or dies on how finely everything is chopped and how firmly it is seasoned.
- The pork"Cold boiled pork" most likely means a simmered joint — shoulder or leg — though in this period boiled pork could also mean pickled or salt pork, which would want less added salt. Leftover roast pork works, though it is drier; a spoonful of the cooking liquor or a little mayonnaise compensates.
- Chop, do not grindHand-chopping to a coarse mince keeps the texture. A food processor turns boiled pork to paste in a few seconds, which gives you potted meat rather than a chopped filling.
- Diluted WorcestershireThe instruction to slacken the sauce with water is there so it disperses evenly through dry meat instead of pooling. A teaspoon of Worcestershire loosened with a teaspoon of water is about right for a cup of chopped pork.
- CeleryOne stalk to roughly a cup of meat. Strip the coarse strings first — older celery varieties were often tougher than the modern kind, and a stringy dice is unpleasant in a fine chop.
- SeasoningBoiled pork is bland and cold food reads flatter still. Salt generously and taste the mixture before it goes near the bread; a little black pepper and a scrape of mustard are in keeping.
- Butter both slicesNot a nicety. The butter seals the crumb against the damp filling, which matters for sandwiches cut ahead and left standing under a napkin.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities; roughly 6 oz of cooked pork will make about a cup of filling, enough for three or four rounds of thin-cut bread.
- KeepingChopped cooked meat moistened with sauce is a good medium for bacteria. Mix it cold, keep it refrigerated, and eat the sandwiches the day they are made.
Sandwich books proliferated around the turn of the twentieth century, driven by the rise of the afternoon tea, the packed luncheon and the chafing-dish supper. A boiled pork joint could stretch across several meals in a household — hot the first day, cold the next, chopped into a sandwich filling after that — and the Worcestershire and celery here look very much like the rescue of a remnant. Worcestershire sauce, commercially bottled in England from the 1830s, was by this period a common way of adding savour to a cold meat mixture, and thin-cut buttered white bread was the mark of a properly genteel sandwich, as distinct from the thick working man's slice.