Ham Salad
This forms a luncheon dish a little out of the ordinary. To 1 cupful of minced ham add 2 hard-boiled eggs previously chopped fine, saving the yolk of one for sprinkling over the top of dish. A tiny pinch of mustard or whatever flavoring is preferred is added and the whole moistened with vinegar and a very little onion juice. Edge the salad bowl with lettuce leaves, turn the mixture into it and sprinkle the yolk of one of the hard-boiled eggs over the top in spots, This may be served on individual dishes as an entrée by placing a large spoonful on a lettuce leaf and adding a spoonful of made dressing in the center.
A leftover dish dressed up for the lunch table, written in the loose style of its period: no quantities for the vinegar, no salt, and an assumption that you have cooked ham on hand. A few decisions are left to the cook.
- "I cupful" is 1 cupfulA typesetting artifact for the numeral 1. That is roughly 5 to 6 oz of ham once minced and packed.
- Minced, not ground to paste'minced' in this period could mean knife-chopped or run through a hand-cranked food chopper; either gives a coarse, still-textured result. A few pulses in a processor tips it into paste; chopping by hand is better.
- Mustard means dry mustardA pinch of powdered English or Colman's-style mustard, not the prepared yellow condiment. If you substitute prepared mustard, use about half a teaspoon and cut the vinegar back.
- Vinegar quantityNone is given. Start with a tablespoon of cider vinegar for the cup of ham, mix, and taste before adding more; ham absorbs less than it seems.
- Onion juiceGrate a peeled onion on the fine side of a box grater and press the pulp through a sieve, or grate directly onto a plate and use the liquid. A quarter teaspoon is a "very little."
- Don't salt it blindCured ham carries the seasoning here, and the recipe calls for no salt. Taste first; you may find it needs none.
- "Made dressing"Period shorthand for a prepared dressing kept on hand, usually a cooked or boiled dressing thickened with egg and flour, or mayonnaise. Either works for the individual servings.
- Yield and holdingServes two as a luncheon salad or four as a small first course. Mix it an hour ahead and keep it cold; the vinegar and onion need time to move through the ham.
Meat salads of this kind filled the awkward space in a household economy between Sunday's ham and Wednesday's nothing, and they multiplied in print once the cast-iron food chopper came into wider kitchen use, a development usually placed in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Grinding the trimmings and the dry end of a joint turned scraps into something that could be sent to the table on lettuce and called a dish. The word entrée here carries its older service meaning, a made dish served between heavier courses rather than the main event, which is why the recipe offers the same mixture two ways: heaped in a bowl for family lunch, or portioned onto individual leaves with a spoonful of dressing when there is company. The reserved egg yolk sprinkled "in spots" is the era's cheapest garnish, and it seems to have been a common finish for salads and cold dishes in books of this sort.