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Ham Rolls
Put a spoonful of poultry dressing on slices of cold boiled ham. Roll and pin with toothpicks. Place on hot spider and put in hot oven for fifteen minutes. (A Contributor.)
Three lines and a leftover: this is a church-supper way of stretching Sunday's ham and dressing into a second meal. The only real decisions are the thickness of the ham and the state of the dressing.
- SpiderA spider is a cast-iron frying pan, originally one with short legs to stand over coals. Any oven-safe skillet works; preheat it so the underside of the rolls sears rather than steams.
- Hot oven"Hot" in books of this period is usually taken to mean somewhere around 400-450F, though the term was never standardised and no temperature is given here. Fifteen minutes at that sort of heat is enough to brown the ham and heat the filling through, nothing more.
- Poultry dressingMost likely a bread stuffing of the sage-and-onion sort, and in practice this would usually be dressing already cooked and left over from a roast, though the recipe does not say so. Raw stuffing containing egg or uncooked giblets will not be safe or palatable in fifteen minutes; use dressing that has already been baked.
- Ham thicknessSlice about 1/8 to 1/4 inch thick. Thinner slices tear when rolled and dry out in the oven; thicker ones will not curl around the filling at all.
- ToothpicksSoak wooden toothpicks briefly so they do not scorch, and count them going in so all come out. Small metal skewers or a tie of kitchen twine are steadier for anything larger than a two-bite roll.
- MoistureBoiled ham and baked dressing are both dry, and dry oven heat makes them drier. A spoonful of stock or melted butter over the rolls before they go in, or a cream or mustard sauce at the table, is what keeps the dish from being sawdust.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities: one spoonful of dressing per slice, and as many slices as you have. As a rough guide, two to three rolls a person as a light main course, one as a first course or supper savoury.
The Philathea Cook Book belongs to a large family of American church and Sunday-school fundraising cookbooks, in which recipes were solicited from members of the congregation and printed with a name or, as here, an anonymous credit. That format may explain the brevity: the contributor was presumably writing for women who already knew what a spider was, what poultry dressing tasted like, and how much ham a family had left on Monday. Dishes of this kind, built entirely from the remains of an earlier roast, were the practical backbone of such collections, and the "roll and pin with toothpicks" trick is one often associated with the period. Boiled ham itself was a staple of the cold larder before home refrigeration was general, since the long cure and the boiling together made it keep well and slice cleanly for days.