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Aberdeen Sandwiches
Chop fine 2 ounces cold chicken, 1 ounce of ham or tongue; add two tablespoonfuls of white sauce and a pinch of curry powder. Fry some squares of toast in butter, cover with this, and bake for 10 minutes. Serve hot as an appetizer.
A tiny hot savoury built on fried bread, of the sort served at the end of an Edwardian dinner rather than the beginning. Everything hinges on the paste being thick enough to hold its shape on the croûte.
- Bind it stiffTwo tablespoons of white sauce to three ounces of chopped meat should give a paste that mounds, not a spread that slumps. If the sauce is thin the mixture runs off the toast in the oven and the bread goes soggy; make the béchamel on the stiff side, closer to a thick panade than a pouring sauce.
- White sauceA plain bechamel: equal butter and flour cooked briefly, milk whisked in, seasoned with salt and a scrape of nutmeg. No recipe for it is given here; such books commonly treated white sauce as a basic preparation covered elsewhere.
- Oven heatNo temperature is stated; the recipe says only to bake for 10 minutes. A moderate oven, around 350F, is a reasonable modern reading -- long enough to heat through and set the surface without drying the meat. The croutes are already cooked and coloured from the frying pan.
- Fry the bread properlyCut the toast into squares roughly 1½ inches across and fry in clarified butter or a butter-and-oil mix until crisp on both sides, then drain. Whole butter over the heat needed here will brown and speck the bread.
- Ham or tongueEither supplies the salt and the colour. Pressed ox tongue is still sold at good delicatessens; a slice of cooked ham does the same work. Salt the mixture only after tasting, since the cured meat carries most of it.
- Curry powderA pinch means a pinch; this is a seasoning gesture, not a curry. Modern commercial blends can be assertive, so start with about an eighth of a teaspoon for the whole quantity and taste.
- YieldThree ounces of meat plus sauce should cover roughly eight to ten small croutes, though the recipe gives no number; scale up straightforwardly if you want them as canapes for a larger group.
- Timing the serviceThey must go to the table straight from the oven. Held even ten minutes, the fried bread softens under the moist filling and the point of the dish is lost.
Aberdeen was often said to be shorthand in Victorian and Edwardian kitchens for good fish and good beef rather than for any single documented original — the attribution here is conventional rather than traceable. What the recipe really represents is the small hot mouthful of anchovy, cheese, kidney or potted meat, and it directs that it be served "as an appetizer". The curry powder is the other period marker, used less to make curry than to lift eggs, sauces and leftover roast poultry. That is exactly its function here, since the dish is at bottom a way of turning two ounces of cold chicken and a scrap of tongue into something worth carrying to the table.