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Wich (Toast and lightly butter three)
Toast and lightly butter three thin slices of white bread; place a lettuce leaf that has been dipped in mayonnaise dressing on the lower slice. On this, place slices of cold roast fowl, then put another slice of toast on top of that, with another leaf of lettuce, follow by thin slices of broiled ham, topped by a third slice of toasted bread. Garnish top with dill pickle, cut in thin slices lengthwise.
This is a club sandwich in its original three-decker form, written for a cook who already had cold roast poultry and a slab of ham in the larder. The whole thing succeeds or fails on the thinness of the bread.
- Slice thin, or it collapsesThree slices of ordinary sandwich bread stacked with two fillings is too tall to bite. Cut the loaf yourself at about a quarter inch, or use thin-sliced sandwich bread, and toast it just to pale gold so it stays flexible enough to compress.
- Cold roast fowlIn a 1909 kitchen this meant leftover roast chicken, or turkey, sliced thin. Deli turkey works but is watery by comparison; a roasted breast chilled overnight and sliced against the grain is much closer to the original.
- Broiled hamNot deli ham. Cut slices about an eighth of an inch from a cooked ham and give them a minute or two under the broiler or in a dry hot pan until the edges brown and the fat renders. The smoky, slightly crisp edge is the point of contrast against the plain fowl.
- Mayonnaise dressingThe book assumes homemade mayonnaise with raw yolk. Commercial mayonnaise is made with pasteurized egg and is the sensible substitute; if you make your own to serve uncooked, use pasteurized eggs.
- Dipping the lettuceCoating the leaf rather than spreading the bread keeps the toast from going soggy. Use a crisp inner romaine or iceberg leaf, shake off the excess, and lay it flat rather than folding it.
- Hold it togetherNothing in the original secures the stack. Press the finished sandwich firmly, run two or three cocktail picks down through it, then cut into quarters on the diagonal, cutting between the picks.
- YieldOne sandwich, generous for one person as a lunch. The lengthwise dill pickle slices laid across the top are the garnish, not a side dish.
The three-decker chicken-and-bacon-or-ham sandwich was already standard American hotel and club fare when Eva Greene Fuller compiled this collection in 1909, and its name is generally traced to the men's club dining rooms of the northeastern United States in the 1890s, with the Saratoga Club often credited, though the attribution is traditional rather than documented. What is clear from the recipe itself is the kitchen it came from: a household that roasted a whole fowl, kept a ham on hand, and treated both as raw material for the next day's cold table. Fuller's book belongs to a brief flurry of single-subject sandwich manuals published in the first decade of the century, when the sandwich was moving from a picnic improvisation to a dish worth plating, garnishing, and printing recipes for.