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Roast Beef Sandwich
Two cups of cold boiled beef chopped fine; add a tablespoonful of tomato catsup, a dash of pepper and celery salt, two tablespoonfuls of melted butter, tablespoonfuls and a teaspoonful of vinegar. Mix well and spread on lightly buttered white bread. Put the two slices together and garnish with an olive.
A simple potted-meat spread that fills perhaps four sandwiches. One line of the original is corrupt in printing, so read it before you start.
- The garbled measurement"two tablespoonfuls of melted butter, tablespoonfuls and a teaspoonful of vinegar" is a typesetting error; a quantity and its ingredient have dropped out. What was lost cannot be recovered. Add the vinegar and butter, then moisten to a spreadable paste with stock or gravy as needed.
- Boiled beef, not roastDespite the title, the text calls for cold boiled beef. Either works: leftover roast is drier and will want more butter and stock, boiled beef is already moist and needs less.
- Chop, don't process"Chopped fine" means knife-cut to a coarse mince. A food processor turns cold beef to paste in seconds and the filling loses all texture; pulse sparingly if you use one at all.
- Celery saltStill sold, and broadly the same thing: ground celery seed cut with salt. Season at the end, since the beef and catsup already carry salt.
- Tomato catsupPeriod catsup was generally thinner and sharper than modern ketchup, which tends to be sweeter, so hold back slightly on it and let the vinegar carry the acid.
- Butter temperatureMelted butter added to cold beef sets into hard flecks. Let the mixture come to cool room temperature before spreading, or the filling crumbles out of the sandwich.
- Bread and holdingLightly buttering both slices keeps the moist filling from soaking through, which matters if the sandwiches are made an hour ahead for a tea or a picnic.
- YieldTwo cups of chopped beef makes about four full sandwiches, or eight small tea sandwiches.
This belongs to the great age of the chopped-meat sandwich filling, when almost every American household cookbook of the 1890s and 1900s carried a page of ways to use up cold joints. Sandwich books proliferated in the same decades that afternoon tea and the packed office lunch became fixtures of middle-class life, and their recipes are essentially systematic: mince a cold protein, bind it with butter, sharpen it with vinegar or a commercial condiment, and spread. The bottled catsup here is a good marker of the period; it had become cheap and ubiquitous by the turn of the century, and cookbook writers reached for it exactly as a later generation would reach for mayonnaise.