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Rare Beef Sandwich
To two parts of chopped lean rare beef, add one part of finely minced celery. Season with salt, pepper, and a little made mustard. Place on a lettuce leaf between thin slices of lightiy buttered white bread.
A leftover-roast sandwich filling, built on the assumption that a joint of rare beef sat in the larder waiting to be used up. The whole thing turns on how finely you cut, not on cooking.
- ProportionsTwo parts beef to one part celery, most likely by volume, though the recipe does not say. Roughly 1 cup chopped beef to 1/2 cup celery should fill about four sandwiches.
- "Chopped" means choppedHand-chop the beef with a knife to a coarse mince. A food processor turns cooked beef to paste and the sandwich loses the texture that makes it worth eating.
- Made mustardPrepared mustard from a jar, as opposed to dry mustard powder. An English or Dijon type suits beef; start with a teaspoon per cup of meat.
- The celeryUse the inner ribs and strip the strings from outer ones. Mince fine or the sandwich pulls apart when bitten.
- BindingThe book gives no dressing, so the filling is dry and will scatter. A tablespoon of mayonnaise or the beef's own cold jelly holds it together without contradicting the recipe.
- Beef temperatureThis is cooked roast beef served cold, not raw. Note that current food-safety guidance for whole cuts of beef is 145F with a three-minute rest; "rare" in the older culinary sense means about 130-135F, which is below that figure. Rest and chill thoroughly before chopping.
- AssemblyButter both slices to the edges. Butter also helps keep the crumb from taking up moisture from the celery, though the recipe says nothing about why it is specified.
Sandwich books proliferated in the United States around 1900, when afternoon teas, card parties and packed luncheons created steady demand for small filled breads and the cookbook trade obliged with slim volumes of nothing else. Cold roast meat is a recurring theme among them, because a household that roasted a joint on Sunday needed somewhere for it to go on Monday, and chopping it fine with a crisp vegetable stretched it further than slicing would, though the collections range widely over cheese, egg, nut and vegetable fillings too. Celery earns its place here for texture and salt-friendly bite; it was a fashionable table vegetable in this period, often served raw in tall glasses as an appetiser, and it appears again and again in sandwich fillings as the cheap route to crunch. The lettuce leaf and the thin, lightly buttered white bread might be read as marking this a lady's-luncheon sandwich rather than a working man's, which would have been thicker cut and less fussed over, though that is inference rather than established fact.