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Rare Beef Sandwiches
To two parts of rare lean beef chopped quite fine, add one part of finely minced celery and salt and pepper to taste. Put together as directed.
A filling rather than a full recipe: the book assumes you have read the general sandwich directions earlier in the chapter and have cold roast beef to use up.
- "Put together as directed""Put together as directed" refers back to the chapter's general sandwich directions, which we do not have on this page; in books of this kind they typically cover thin-cut bread, buttering the slices, filling, pressing and cutting. If those directions do call for butter, it is what gives the dry chopped beef something to cling to.
- What "rare lean beef" meansAlmost certainly cold cooked beef, rare in the middle, with fat and gristle removed rather than raw beef, though the recipe itself does not spell this out. If you are working from deli roast beef, chop it by hand rather than in a food processor, which turns it to paste.
- The two-to-one ratio"Parts" are loosely measured and most likely by volume, though weight would give much the same result. About 1 cup chopped beef to 1/2 cup minced celery is a workable batch and should fill four to six sandwiches on standard sliced bread.
- Celery is the hingeIt has to be minced fine and from the inner ribs; coarse outer stalks are stringy and will pull out of the sandwich in one piece. Mince it just before assembling so it stays crisp.
- MoistureThe recipe gives no binder at all, which reads dry to modern taste. A spoonful of mayonnaise or a little of the beef's own jelly from the roasting pan binds the filling without changing its character.
- SeasoningCold beef needs more salt than hot beef. Season, then taste on a piece of bread rather than on its own — the bread flattens the seasoning noticeably.
- HoldingChopped cooked meat has a great deal of cut surface. Keep the filling refrigerated and assemble close to serving; if the sandwiches are for a picnic or lunch box, keep them cold in transit.
Sandwich chapters swelled in American cookbooks around the turn of the twentieth century, a growth often attributed to the rise of the afternoon tea, the church supper, the railway lunch and the school lunch pail, and many of them are frankly organized around leftovers — cold roast, cold fowl, the last of the ham. This one is typical of the genre in pairing meat with minced celery, which appeared constantly in that period's salads and fillings as the cheap way to get crispness and a little sharpness into a soft mixture; celery was a fashionable table vegetable in the late nineteenth century, sold in tall glass celery vases, and its use as a chopped extender in sandwiches and salads followed from its ubiquity. The instruction "put together as directed" is itself a period marker: the writer expects the book to be read as a chapter, not consulted one page at a time.