Meat Paste Sandwich

The label on the jar says meat paste, and that is as specific as it intends to get. Where the salmon and crab pots at least name their animal, the plain meat paste keeps it general on purpose: a cooked, cured, finely milled blend that might be built on beef, on ham, on chicken, or on the offcuts of all three, sold as a flavour rather than a named cut. For most of the twentieth century, the name on that label was Shippam's, and the jar came from Chichester: a small glass pot with a foil seal and a burgundy lid that turned up in packed lunch tins from Cornwall to Dundee as reliably as it turned up on the bottom shelf of the corner shop. That vagueness about the meat is not a flaw in the product but its commercial logic. It is the cheapest jar on the potted-paste shelf, the one that turns the most ordinary scraps of meat into something smooth and savoury and shelf-stable, and it asks the eater not to inquire too closely which scraps.

Inside, the milling is the point. The meat is cooked down and ground until no fibre survives, bound with fat and seasoning into a dense, faintly tacky emulsion that takes a knife with no resistance and tastes of savour without any texture of its own. Strong and salted to keep, it works in a small quantity, laid against soft bread so the bread carries the body and the paste carries the flavour. Butter goes on first, less to add richness than to seal the crumb so the paste's oil does not sink in and grey the slice, and to draw the savour evenly to the edges.

It fails in plain ways. Spread heavy, the salt and the fat climb over everything and the slice turns greasy and monotonous; spread mean, the bread reads as buttered bread with a brown rumour somewhere in it. The bread has to stay soft and close-grained, because a chewy or seeded loaf would set its own crust against a filling that has no structure to answer with and turn lunch into work. There is nothing else in the sandwich by design: no leaf, no pickle, no second layer, just savour against soft white, the whole thing leaning on one cured note holding the centre.

Cut into small squares it smells faintly of stock and clove, a soft cooked-meat warmth with none of the sharpness of fresh cold cuts. The bite is uniform from the first contact, white crumb yielding into butter into the smooth paste with no seam between them, the texture the same all the way through. The flavour is meaty and rounded and a little salty, a low savoury hum more than a clear taste of any one animal, and it fades clean with no aftertaste. Nothing in it crunches or surprises; it is built to taste reliably of meat-in-general and to do so identically every time.

It belongs to the modest end of British eating, the cupboard jar that turned bread and butter into a filled lunch when money was short and the larder thin. The packed lunch tin, the long-train sandwich, the plate of cut triangles on a tea tray beside the egg ones: this is its native ground, frugal and unfussy and a little old-fashioned. Brand is half of how people remember it, Shippam's above the rest and Princes alongside, and the jar lived in the cupboard door for months, reached for without thinking on a day when something quick was wanted and nothing fresh was in.

What makes the Shippam's version distinct from the supermarket-own paste beside it on the shelf is the seasoning, not the animal. The house blend has always leaned toward a quiet warmth, a trace of spice in the back of the milled meat that recalls the Victorian potted-beef tradition the firm came out of. The modern Princes version is blander, rounder, more neutral; the Shippam's pot gives the paste a faint character its competitors sand away. Most people who grew up with one or the other cannot be argued out of their version, which suggests the seasoning is the sandwich's real personality.

Shippam's and the Potting of Meat

The meat paste is older than its sea-creature cousins, because the firm most associated with it began in meat. Shippam's of Chichester started as a West Sussex grocery and became, from the 1850s, a pork butcher whose sausages grew famous enough to be sold as the Celebrated Chichester Sausage. From there the business pushed into preserving the rest of the carcass: in 1886 it began canning meats, ox tongues among them, and in 1894 it introduced the potted pastes that carried its name across Britain.

Those pastes grew out of a much older domestic habit. Long before refrigeration, English cooks preserved cooked meat by pounding it fine, pressing it into little earthenware pots, and capping each with melted clarified butter that set hard and shut out the air, a method that kept beef, tongue, ham, and game edible for weeks. Potted meat of that kind was a proper dish at the Georgian and Victorian table, spread on toast and served as a savoury, and the commercial paste is its descendant, the butter-sealed pot turned into a milled spread sold cheap in glass.

Shippam's was acquired by Princes in 2009, and production shifted away from Chichester after more than a century and a half in Sussex. The Shippam's name survived the deal and still appears on the jar, though the operation behind it is no longer the family-owned firm that registered its Celebrated Sausage trade in the 1850s. The sandwich predates that sale by a long margin; the jar simply changed hands while the formula and the lunchbox habit continued.