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Ham Canapés
1/2 cup minced ham 2 tablespoons butter 1 teaspoon chopped parsley 6 slices buttered bread Mix the ham, butter and parsley to a smooth paste; prepare the bread as for cheese canapés; spread with the mixture and serve.
A potted-ham spread on toast, written for a cook who had already read the cheese canapé recipe a page or two earlier. The only real difficulty is that missing instruction.
- "Prepare the bread as for cheese canapés"The instruction is missing here, and the recipe gives no guidance. Canapé bases in comparable books are commonly trimmed of crusts, cut into rounds, fingers or triangles, and toasted or fried in butter, so that is the likely intent. Since the ham paste is served cold and uncooked, toast the bases and let them cool before spreading, or they will go soft under the butter.
- Minced hamNot raw ground pork — this is cooked ham, cured and fully cooked, chopped as fine as you can get it. A food processor turns the ham and butter into a smooth paste in seconds, which is what the recipe is after; a knife and board give better texture.
- Butter proportionHalf a cup of ham to two tablespoons of butter gives a stiff paste rather than a thin spread. Use butter at room temperature so it creams into the meat instead of sitting in flecks.
- The bread is buttered twiceThe ingredient list calls for buttered bread and the paste contains butter as well. If you are toasting the bases in butter, skip the additional buttering or the whole thing reads as grease.
- SeasoningNo salt or pepper is specified, as is common in recipes of this kind; cured ham of the period may also have been saltier than modern equivalents. Taste before spreading; a grind of black pepper and a little mustard or cayenne bring a milder modern ham into balance.
- YieldSix slices of bread give roughly a dozen canapés if cut into rounds, up to 24 if quartered -- enough for six people as a first bite with drinks.
- Make-aheadThe paste keeps three or four days covered in the refrigerator. Spread it only shortly before serving; assembled canapés soften within an hour.
Canapés appear in American household cookery around the turn of the twentieth century, borrowed from French service, where canapé means a couch or sofa -- the usual explanation being that the bread is the seat on which the savoury topping sits. The small, hand-held, no-cutlery bite belonged to the informal reception rather than the long seated dinner. The ham version is the thriftiest of the family: it is close to potted meat, in which cooked meat is pounded with butter, and it let a cook turn the last of a boiled ham into something that looked deliberate. Cross-references of the "as for cheese canapés" kind are common in cookbooks of the era, which assumed the pages would be read together and repeated as little as possible.