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Sandwich (Run enough chicken through)
Run enough chicken through the meat chopper to make two cupfuls; cut out the stem ends and remove the seeds from three large sweet peppers; run them through the meat chopper; mix the chicken and pepper together; season with half a teaspoonful of salt, and two tablespoonfuls of sweet cream. Place between thin slices of lightly buttered white bread. Cut in triangles. Serve on lettuce leaf.
A 1900s tea-table sandwich that depends entirely on the chicken being cooked and the peppers being chopped fine enough to hold together. A few points on equipment and proportions.
- The chicken must be cookedThe book appears to assume leftover roast or boiled fowl. Grind cooked, cooled meat only; raw ground chicken in an uncooked sandwich is not an option.
- Meat chopperA hand-cranked grinder clamped to the table. A food processor pulsed in short bursts does the same job, but stop while the meat still has texture rather than reducing it to paste.
- Sweet peppersBell peppers, probably green. Three large ones ground raw give a considerable quantity of very wet pulp.
- Drain the peppersThis is the hinge. Ground raw pepper releases a great deal of water and will soak the bread within minutes. Press the pulp in a sieve or squeeze it in a towel before mixing, or the sandwiches collapse before they reach the table.
- Sweet creamSimply fresh unsoured cream, as opposed to the sour cream also sold then. Heavy cream is the closest match. Two tablespoons is a light binder, not a dressing; mayonnaise gives a sturdier, less perishable filling.
- YieldTwo cups of chicken with the pepper makes roughly three cups of filling, enough for something like eight to ten rounds of bread.
- Holding timeWith cream rather than mayonnaise as the binder, these are meant to be assembled and eaten within the hour. Keep the filling covered and cold until the moment of spreading.
Sandwich books proliferated in the United States between about 1900 and 1920, driven by the afternoon tea, the card party and the newly fashionable ladies' luncheon, where a bread-and-filling course served on lettuce was thought lighter and more genteel than a hot meat dish. Many of them lean on the hand meat chopper, a fixture of the turn-of-the-century kitchen, which turned yesterday's fowl into something that could be spread. The sweet pepper here is a marker of the period: cookbooks of these decades used bell peppers freely, chopped raw, for color and a mild bite in salads and sandwich fillings. The instruction to cut in triangles and serve on a lettuce leaf is standard for the genre, and says more about presentation at a tea table than about the food.