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Ham and Mushrooms, Croustade
1 1/2 cups medium thick white sauce 1 1/2 cups diced cooked ham 1 tablespoon chopped ripe olives 1 tablespoon pimiento 1 1/2 cups small button mushrooms, cooked seasoning Make the white sauce first, then add all ingredients to it in order. Serve in fancy-cut croustades, garnish with chopped parsley and sieved hard-cooked egg yolks. Croustades are made by cutting thick slices of bread, about 2 inches, removing soft center and toasting on all sides. These may be buttered before pouring the ham and mushrooms into them.
A creamed-ham filling served in hollowed toast cases — the sort of thing a 1930s hostess could assemble from leftovers and a can or two. The whole dish depends on the sauce being thick enough to sit in the bread without soaking it.
- "Medium thick" white sauceIn books of this period that means roughly 2 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons flour per cup of milk — thicker than a pouring sauce, loose enough to spoon. A thin sauce will turn the croustades to mush within a minute of filling.
- Button mushroomsThe original may well mean canned buttons, drained, though 'cooked' would equally cover fresh mushrooms simmered or sauteed. Fresh small cremini or white mushrooms work, but saute them dry first to drive off their water, or that water will thin your sauce.
- PimientoA tablespoon of chopped canned pimiento, drained and patted dry. Jarred roasted red pepper is the closest current substitute; it is sweeter and wetter, so blot it well.
- SeasoningThe recipe leaves this entirely open. Season the sauce before the ham goes in, then taste again at the end — cooked ham is often salty enough that you will want only pepper, a little nutmeg, and perhaps mustard.
- CroustadesCut the bread from an unsliced loaf at a full 2 inches, hollow out the centre, and toast all surfaces — the recipe specifies 'toasting on all sides', so the inside included. A moderate oven, turning once, dries them more evenly than a toaster or broiler.
- Butter before fillingThe optional buttering is worth doing. A thin coat inside the hollow helps seal the crumb against the sauce.
- Assemble at the last momentHold the filling hot and the cases warm and separate, then fill as you plate. Filled croustades do not wait.
- YieldAbout 4 1/2 cups of filling, enough for six generous croustades or eight modest ones.
The croustade — from the same root as crust — was the practical answer to a question that occupied American cookbooks for decades: what do you serve a creamed mixture in? Patty shells took pastry skill, toast points collapsed, and timbale cases needed a special iron; a thick slice of bread hollowed and toasted needed nothing but a loaf and a paring knife. Creamed ham with mushrooms, olives and pimiento is the standard vocabulary of the interwar chafing-dish supper, when the Sunday night meal was deliberately informal and often built from Sunday dinner's leftover ham. The finishing garnish of chopped parsley and hard-cooked yolk pushed through a sieve — sometimes called mimosa — was a stock decorative gesture of the era, added because a pale dish in a pale case wanted colour.