Home › Sandwiches › Sandwich Filling
Sandwich Filling
Blanche Triggs.
Ground boiled ham and pickles with salad dressing.
Equal parts of cheese grated and olives cut fine with salad dressing. Equal parts of nuts cut fine and grated cheese with salad dressing.
Three fillings in one entry, each built on the same formula: something savory and finely chopped, bound with dressing. The proportions are left to the cook, which is normal for a church cookbook written by people who had made the thing a hundred times.
- What "salad dressing" means hereIn a community cookbook of this era it usually means a cooked or boiled dressing — egg yolks, vinegar, a little flour or mustard, thickened over heat — rather than mayonnaise. Bottled mayonnaise was on the market in American towns by the 1910s and either will work; the cooked version is tangier and holds up better against ham.
- Bind, don't drownAdd dressing a spoonful at a time until the mixture just coheres when pressed. Too much and the filling weeps into the bread within the hour, which is the failure mode for all three of these.
- "Ground" means the food chopperA hand-cranked meat grinder gave a uniform, slightly pasty texture. A food processor pulsed in short bursts does the same; run it continuously and the ham turns to paste. Grind the pickles separately and squeeze out the brine before combining.
- The cheeseThe recipe says only "cheese grated"; in a Midwestern kitchen of the period this would most likely have been a firm yellow American or cheddar. Grate it on the fine side so it binds with the dressing rather than sitting in shreds.
- OlivesProbably green olives, possibly the pimiento-stuffed sort that had become a fashionable pantry item. Chop fine and pat dry; olive brine will thin the dressing fast.
- NutsThe recipe does not say which; walnuts or pecans would both be plausible choices. Chop fine. Toasting and cooling them first is optional and firms up the texture against the cheese.
- Quantity and yieldThe recipe gives no quantities. As a rough guide, about a cup of finished filling will cover eight to ten sandwiches on thin white bread. For a tea or reception, fillings like these were commonly cut into fingers or triangles with the crusts trimmed.
- TimingMix a few hours ahead so the flavors settle, but spread only shortly before serving. The ham-and-pickle filling in particular keeps well covered in the refrigerator for two or three days.
Sandwich fillings earned their own section in community cookbooks around the turn of the twentieth century, when the afternoon tea, the church social and the ladies' luncheon all called for something that could be made in quantity, cut small and eaten standing up. Two things made these particular fillings possible: the cast-iron food chopper clamped to the kitchen table, which turned leftover boiled ham into a spreadable paste, and the glass jar of stuffed olives, an imported luxury that had become an ordinary grocery item in American towns by then. The formula Blanche Triggs sets down — chop it fine, bind it with dressing — is less a recipe than a template, and versions of all three of these combinations appear under different names in fundraising cookbooks of the period. That the contributor's name is attached matters: the byline was both a credit and a small social record of who cooked what.