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Pressed Chicken Sandwich
Boil fowl until tender; remove bones and skin; chop fine; season with salt, pepper, and sage to taste. Mix teaspoonful of mustard with a tablespoonful of vinegar, heat and pour over chicken, with some of the broth, and press in earthen dish. When cold and ready for use, slice and place between thin, lightly buttered bread with a crisp lettuce leaf between.
A late-Victorian and Edwardian standby: cooked fowl set in its own reduced broth, which gels on cooling into a sliceable loaf. The whole thing hinges on the broth being concentrated enough to set.
- The hinge: gelatin in the brothNothing but the collagen from the bird's bones and skin holds this together. Simmer the carcass, skin and feet, if you have them, and reduce the strained broth until a spoonful chilled on a saucer sets firm; a cup or so of that, poured over the chopped meat, is all the binder needed. A watery broth gives a loaf that collapses when sliced.
- "Fowl"In this period that meant a mature laying hen, tough, fatty and full of connective tissue. A supermarket 4 to 5 lb roasting chicken works, though it gives less body to the broth; bone-in thighs and legs give more. Allow 1.5 to 2.5 hours at a bare simmer rather than a rolling boil, which shreds the meat and clouds the stock.
- MustardA "teaspoonful of mustard" here means dry mustard powder, slaked with the vinegar into a paste and warmed to knock back its raw bite. Prepared jarred mustard will not behave the same way and is much milder by volume.
- SageAssume dried rubbed sage, and use a light hand: half a teaspoon for a whole bird's worth of meat is plenty. Sage was a common poultry herb in Anglo-American cookery, and some older recipes use it more heavily than modern taste prefers.
- "Press in earthen dish"Any straight-sided loaf pan or crock will do. Line it with plastic wrap for clean turning out, pack the meat in tightly, pour the broth over, cover with a plate cut to fit and set a 2 to 3 lb weight on top, such as a can or a foil-wrapped brick.
- Chill, do not cool on the counterThe original says only "when cold." Press it in the refrigerator, not at room temperature: a dense mass of moist cooked poultry sitting out for hours is exactly the condition that grows bacteria. Six hours under weight sets it; overnight is better.
- Slicing and keepingTurn out the chilled loaf and cut thin slices with a long sharp knife, wiping the blade between cuts. Keep it covered and refrigerated and use within three days.
- YieldA 4 to 5 lb bird yields roughly 3 to 4 cups of chopped meat, enough for a loaf that will make about 12 to 16 sandwiches.
- The bread"Thin, lightly buttered" is doing work: the butter seals the crumb against the moisture of the pressed meat, which is why these sandwiches survived being made ahead for a tea table or a picnic basket.
Pressed or potted meats were the practical answer to a bird too old to roast and a household with no reliable refrigeration: long simmering broke down the connective tissue, and the gelatin that came out of it sealed the meat under its own aspic. Pressed chicken appears frequently in American community and household cookbooks from the 1880s through the 1920s, often recommended for church suppers, luncheons and travel, because it could be made the day before and sliced cold. Small sandwich books like this one belong to a period when the afternoon tea, the bridge party and the boxed lunch created demand for fillings that were firm, thin-sliceable and would not soak the bread. The sage-and-mustard seasoning echoes older English seasonings for cooked fowl, where dry mustard slaked in vinegar did the work now done by a jar in the refrigerator door.