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Chicken Sandwich
Chicken pounded to a paste, then mixed with a paste made of the yolks of hard boiled eggs mashed, a little cream and a little butter, then seasoned with salt, pepper and a few drops of onion juice, makes a delicious chicken sandwich.
A potted-chicken filling of the pre-mayonnaise era, bound with egg yolk and butter rather than dressing. The proportions are left entirely to the cook, so treat the following as a working starting point.
- Working proportionsAbout 1 cup finely pounded cooked chicken to the yolks of 2 hard-boiled eggs, 1 tablespoon softened butter and 1 to 2 tablespoons cream. That fills roughly six sandwiches, or a dozen cut into fingers.
- Pounded to a pasteThe original assumes a mortar. A food processor does it in seconds, but pulse rather than run it continuously or the meat turns gluey and pasty; a coarse, spreadable texture holds the butter better.
- Use dark and light meatBreast alone pounds up dry and mealy. A mix of thigh and breast, or the meat picked from a poached bird, gives a filling that holds together without extra liquid.
- Onion juiceOnce obtained by grating an onion and pressing the pulp in a cloth. A few drops go a long way; grate on a microplane and use the juice that collects, or substitute the smallest amount of very finely minced shallot.
- Butter is the binderIt must be properly soft, at room temperature, and worked into the yolks before the chicken goes in. Cold butter leaves flecks and the paste will crumble when spread.
- Keeping and servingButter-bound fillings firm up in the refrigerator; make the paste ahead, then bring it back to spreadable before assembling. Cooked chicken salads should be kept cold and eaten the same day, and sandwiches made no more than a few hours before serving, wrapped in a damp cloth to keep the bread from drying.
- BreadA fine-crumbed white loaf, sliced thin and crusts trimmed, is typical of sandwiches of this kind in cookbooks of the period, though the recipe itself says nothing about bread. The paste is rich enough that it arguably needs no additional butter on the bread.
Sandwich chapters expanded rapidly in American cookbooks around 1900, driven by the rise of the afternoon tea, the club luncheon and the picnic basket, and many of the fillings in them are pastes rather than sliced fillings — potted ham, anchovy butter, pounded chicken. The technique is older than the sandwich: pounding cooked meat with butter until it could be pressed into a pot was a well-established English way of preserving and stretching the remains of a roast bird, and hard-boiled yolk worked with cream was one binder in use before bottled mayonnaise and commercial salad dressing became household staples in the 1910s and 1920s. Onion juice appears frequently in books of this period.