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Reception Sandwich
Equal quantities of breast of cold boiled chicken and tongue, put through food chopper; season with celery salt, cayenne, anchovy paste, and mayonnaise. Place mixture between slices of lightly buttered white bread with crisp lettuce leaf that has been dipped in tarragon vinegar.
A straightforward potted-meat filling that depends entirely on the ratio of paste to mayonnaise. The original gives no quantities, so work by taste and texture.
- TongueCooked tongue (the recipe calls only for it boiled; cured beef tongue is the commonest form) was a familiar cold-larder item in this period; today it usually means ordering from a butcher or buying a vacuum-packed cured tongue. Good deli-sliced corned beef or a mild cured ham gives a similar salty counterweight to the chicken, though it is not the same thing.
- Food chopperA hand-cranked meat grinder with a coarse plate. A food processor pulsed a few times does the job, but stop while the meat still has some grain; run it too long and the filling turns to paste and weeps.
- Anchovy pasteUse it with restraint. A quarter-teaspoon per cup of chopped meat is enough to register as savoury depth; tongue is already salty, so season with the anchovy first and add salt only at the end, if at all.
- Celery saltStill widely sold, though formulations and salt content vary from brand to brand. Add a pinch, mix, taste, repeat.
- MayonnaiseEnough only to bind, roughly two tablespoons per cup of meat. A wet filling will soak through the bread within the hour, which defeats the point of a reception sandwich.
- The lettuceDip the leaf in tarragon vinegar and then shake or blot it well. Vinegar carried into the sandwich is the main cause of soggy bread here, and the leaf only needs to be scented, not soaked.
- Yield and servingTwo cups of filling makes roughly eight full sandwiches. If cut down into the small crustless triangles or fingers usual at a reception, that is about thirty-two pieces, though the recipe itself says nothing about trimming or shape. Assemble no more than an hour ahead, cover with a damp cloth, and refrigerate.
"Reception sandwich" is a category as much as a recipe: the small, crustless, pale-bread sandwich made to be eaten standing up, in a glove, at an afternoon reception or tea. The pairing of chicken breast with tongue recalls the potted meats and forcemeats of English cookery, where the two were layered in a raised pie or pounded together in a pot under clarified butter, though the resemblance is easier to see than any direct line of descent. What marks this version is the equipment and the seasonings: the hand-cranked food chopper had made minced fillings a routine home operation, and bottled anchovy paste, celery salt and tarragon vinegar were all available on a grocer's shelf. Sandwich books proliferated in this period, and it is often said that such convenience products were what let a hostess assemble dozens of identical, delicate sandwiches without a professional kitchen behind her.