A Shooter's Sandwich Is Like Beef Wellington Without All The Work
Beef Wellington — the British classic of steak and mushrooms wrapped up in flaky pastry — is absolutely not a quick dinner to make. While not too difficult in terms of technique, it requires a lot of different steps. But perhaps there's an easier way. Enter the shooter's sandwich, another British creation, which could be considered something like a cheater's way to make beef Wellington.
The shooter's sandwich brings together mushrooms and beef in a similar way to the beef Wellington, but ditches the pastry in favor of regular bread (inside which the fillings are stuffed) — hence the "sandwich" part of the name. While it has fewer steps than a beef Wellington, it does require a good chunk of time, as the sandwich is typically pressed for several hours or even overnight, making the bread a whole lot denser.
The resemblance between the shooter's sandwich and beef Wellington is intentional: It was devised as a portable version of pastry-wrapped beef in the Edwardian era (early 1900s). The reason it was flattened was to shrink the size of it — considering that it uses a whole loaf of bread, this seems reasonable. (That large size also means you'd typically cut it into wedges and serve it to more than one person as a lunch.) While the sandwich's exact history is hazy, it seems it was intended as a lunch to bring on a shooting expedition.
How to prepare a shooter's sandwich
There are ample variations on this sandwich, but this is the classic version. For the bread, use a whole crusty loaf — slice off the top and scoop out a good portion of the bread inside. As with beef Wellington, you'll need mushroom duxelles — basically sautéed mushrooms and shallots, flavored with cream and an alcohol like brandy. Then there are the standard bracing condiments of mustard and horseradish.
For the beef, you can use beef tenderloin, often regarded as the "right" cut for beef Wellington, since it's forgivingly tender, although some recipes suggest cuts like ribeye which are fattier and more flavorful. Either way, the big difference is that you'll cook the steak separately, as opposed to Wellington, where the components are assembled and baked.
Once you put everything together, you have to wrap and squash it for several hours until it's compact: There's no single way to do this, but a good idea is to put something flat like a cutting board or baking tray on the sandwich and weigh it down with anything heavy: Books, a bag of potatoes, you name it. That flattening time lets the flavor soak into the bread, and might make the outer layer a little more pastry-like by compacting bread so it's not so fluffy. But the main reason it's flattened likely goes back to its origins: to make it smaller and easy to transport on an old-fashioned shooting expedition, or any other excursion of your choice.