The Canteen in Aberdeen: Pheasant Sandwiches

In December of 1941, only ten days after the Japanese sneak attack at Pearl Harbor, the people of North Platte, Nebraska gathered around the local depot of the Union Pacific railroad, waiting for a troop train that, they had heard, would be carrying the members of their local National Guard company westward on their way to training and eventual deployment. In the 1940s, before diesel locomotives had been widely adopted by railroad companies in the US, the existing steam engines needed to stop every 100 miles or so during the long cross-country trip, to take on coal and water, to give the crews a rest, to service the moving parts of the machines. North Platte’s depot was one of those stops, and the locals gathered there with gifts of food and cigarettes, letters for the boys to read on their way west, or simply to hug a loved one for a moment on their trip.

When the train arrived, it was full of National Guard troops–but Kansans, not Nebraskans. It didn’t take long for the gathered North Platte folks to decide to simply gift the food and smokes and affection they’d brought to the servicemen in front of them, whoever they were. In a letter to the editor of the local paper the following day, North Platte resident Rae Wilson suggested creating a volunteer canteen at the depot and continuing to provide the passing troop trains with a similar welcome, with gifts and smiles and encouragement. “We can help this way when we can’t help any other way,” she concluded.

The canteen in North Platte, about which Chicago-based journalist Bob Greene wrote the 2002 oral history Once Upon a Town: The Miracle of the North Platte Canteen, operated from Christmas Day in 1941 to April 1st, 1946, by which time all or most of the surviving servicemen had made it home. Local businesses donated money and supplies toward the cause. Nebraskans from up to 200 miles away donated their time and their food–which was scarce, and rationed during wartime–to supply the canteen and show the servicemen their appreciation.

Similar canteens sprang up around the country, on the various railroad lines that had been pressed into service for troop movements–in Dennison, Ohio, on the Pennsylvania Railroad line; in several towns across Iowa, Boone, Marshalltown, Mason City, Oelwein, and Waterloo; in Martinez, California, on the Southern Pacific line; in Streator, Illinois on the old Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway; and dozens of other towns, in the Midwest and the Northeast and the South, on the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific Coast. Everywhere, Americans on the homefront came together to offer homegrown kindnesses to “our boys” heading overseas to fight. North Platte was the longest-running (4 years and 3 months), highest-volume (some estimates say almost 7 million servicemen went through North Platte during the war) and perhaps best known of the World War 2 railroad canteens, but far from the only one.

If another World War 2 canteen could be said to approach the renown of the North Platte canteen, it might be the one in Aberdeen, South Dakota. 400 miles north of North Platte, on the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railroad, the Aberdeen Canteen was better known by a nickname it earned from the sandwiches it served–the Pheasant Canteen. When Bob Greene went looking for the North Platte Canteen in the early 2000s, it was long gone, torn down in 1973–Union Pacific completed its last passenger run along that line 2 years before; Amtrak took over passenger railroad service nationwide, and did not operate on the line running through North Platte. In Aberdeen though, the railway station was preserved. The building was anyway–though no longer an active railway station, it is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. In 2013, a group of former volunteers from the Canteen, working together as the “WWII Pheasant Canteen Team” produced a documentary about the canteen called Pheasant Canteen: A Living Legacy. Though truth be told, the documentary is as much about the ladies of the Pheasant Canteen Team and the work they’ve done to preserve the story of the canteen as it is about the canteen itself.

At first, the canteen in Aberdeen typically served ham sandwiches along with the usual candy and birthday cakes, cigarettes and coffee, but as the war wore on, and perhaps as rationing took its toll on the available supplies, the farmers of South Dakota began bringing in the gamebirds they’d shot in their fields and donated them to the cause. The ringneck pheasant was South Dakota’s state bird, and population estimates at the time put their numbers well into the millions in that state alone. The servicemen grew to like the pheasant sandwiches. First-time visitors who had heard about the pheasant sandwiches would request them in preference to the ham sandwiches. The pheasants on the plains were bountiful, and easier to come by than rationed meats like ham; eventually large hunts were organized to supply the canteen.

South Dakota is still known for its pheasant hunting. The official state sandwich is, as we discussed in a previous post, the Fry Bread Taco, or Indian Taco as some local menus call it. But many of the “best sandwich from each state” listicles we’ve mentioned previously on this site reference the Pheasant Sandwich. These articles are silly, as I pointed out on the most recent episode of the Sandwich Talk podcast, and their results often ludicrous–cultures produce cuisines, not states, and cultures don’t necessarily follow borders, so let’s celebrate all the sandwiches rather than arbitrarily picking a sandwich avatar for each political entity like we’re selecting Street Fighter characters at the arcade–but I suppose they do what they are intended to, which is drive engagement, whether positive or negative.

And among the things that town in South Dakota has preserved about the Pheasant Canteen is the original recipe for the pheasant sandwich, though scaled down a bit I’d imagine from the quantities they were making during the heyday of the canteen. I am recreating the recipe here for preservation purposes only–too many of the recipes I’ve linked to in years past are no longer online, and I want this one to persevere. Its source is the link above, to the Travel South Dakota website, though I’ve seen identical or nearly-identical recipes on a half-dozen other sites.

It currently is pheasant season in South Dakota, which runs from mid-to-late October through January. I’ve never been hunting though–I didn’t grow up around guns, and while I don’t have a problem with it, I also don’t have a problem with pulling up to a retail meat market that carries “exotic” meats and just buying a couple of frozen pheasants.

The sandwich recipe calls for cooked pheasant meat but does not specify how the pheasants are to be cooked. They may have been roasted in an oven. But for ease of cooking in volume I imagine they were poached instead, which is how I approached the birds. I simmered them for 30 minutes in water with aromatics (and I now have a couple quarts of pheasant stock in my freezer as a result).

Each pheasant yields about 2 cups of chopped/shredded meat. The recipe calls for 3 cups. So 2 pheasants makes a bit too much meat, allowing me to sample the meat without the salad. I’d feared that the meat would be have some awful flavor that people generally call “gamey.” These were farmed pheasants though, rather than wild pheasants, and the most I can say about the meat is that it tasted like chicken, only more so. “More chicken than chicken,” as if Tyrell Corporation had dabbled in replicant livestock.

To the 3 cups of finely chopped pheasant meat, the recipe calls for adding 2 carrots, shredded; a half cup of finely chopped celery; half an onion, finely chopped; 2 boiled eggs, finely chopped; 2 teaspoons of sweet pickle relish, enough “mayonnaise or salad dressing to blend nicely” and salt and pepper to taste. I adjusted by adding a bit more of the sweet pickle relish, because I thought that the sweet/sour flavor of it helped bring out a sweet element of the pheasant meat as well.

The recipe simply calls for “sandwich bread,” and I asked at a nearby bakery what would be the best simple sandwich bread they had on-hand to recreate a sandwich from the 1940s. I thought they’d suggest the honey white bread, which isn’t my favorite, but instead they recommended this simple Italian loaf.

Making the sandwich is easy. The recipe does not call for anything other than bread and the pheasant salad, but by all means, if you prefer buttering the bread first I don’t think that would be out of place. If you’d like to add lettuce, or tomato, or any other enhancement, those also would be welcome. I kept it simple and made the sandwich the way the recipe described.

This bread is slightly sturdier than the typical squishy white bread you’ll find in the bread aisle at an American grocery store, which helps it stand up to a mayonnaise-heavy filling like this pheasant salad even without a layer of butter spread on as a moisture barrier.

I suppose then that I could have gone even more mayo-heavy on the salad, but with plenty of vegetables in the salad, it did not seem dry at all. The onions and carrots and celery provided plenty of crunch as well, while the sweet/sour of the pickle relish helped bring out the slightly (but pleasantly) assertive flavor of the pheasant. More mayonnaise wouldn’t be unwelcome–but it would be unnecessary.

It’s a good sandwich. Is it a mind-blowing sandwich? Maybe not, but…

If I were an 18 year old GI in 1944, newly graduated from high school and shipped off to war, wrapped up in a uniform and put on an uncomfortable and loud train with hundreds of my fellow recruits as we slowly made our way across the country to an uncertain future, and somewhere at yet another brief stop in the flat featureless gray of America’s midsection I stepped off the train for a breath of fresh air and to my surprise, here was a smiling young volunteer handing me a cup of coffee and a pheasant sandwich, maybe stopping for a moment to chat with me, or even take a turn and jitterbug with me to the tune of a pre-war hit record spinning on the station turntable…

Well I might think that was the best sandwich I’d ever had in my life. And if I made it back from the war, I might still be telling people about that sandwich 60 years later.