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Chopped Ham Sandwiches
Finely chop cold boiled ham, and moisten with Sauce Tartare. Spread between thin slices of buttered bread prepared as for Bread and Butter Folds.
A three-line filling that assumes you have already read two other entries in the book. The hinges are the sauce and the bread technique it cross-references.
- Sauce TartareIn Farmer's usage this is a mayonnaise worked with finely chopped capers, pickles, olives and parsley — not the sweet jarred tartar sauce sold for fish. A good store mayonnaise with chopped cornichons, capers and a little parsley gets you there; as a starting point, try about 3 tablespoons of sauce to 1 cup of chopped ham and add more only if the filling will not hold.
- Bread and Butter FoldsThe referenced method is to butter the cut face of the loaf before slicing, then cut a slice as thin as you can manage, so the butter seals the crumb. Slices are trimmed of crust and folded or cut in halves or triangles rather than stacked thick.
- The chop, not the grindHand-chopped ham keeps distinct grain; a food processor turns it to paste in seconds and the filling weeps. Pulse only if you must, and stop while the pieces still read as pieces.
- Cold boiled hamA whole simmered ham was ordinary kitchen stock in a household of this period. Sliced deli ham works, but choose a firm unglazed one — honey or maple cured ham fights the capers and vinegar in the sauce.
- Moisten, literallyThe filling should hold together when pressed and no more. Too much sauce and thin buttered bread goes translucent within the hour.
- Yield and holdingA cup of chopped ham fills roughly eight thin slices, cut into sixteen to twenty-four small sandwiches. Made ahead, they keep an hour or two under a damp cloth in the refrigerator; beyond that the bread suffers.
Sandwiches of this kind belong to the tea table and the reception buffet rather than to lunch. Fannie Farmer's sandwich chapter is full of chopped-and-moistened fillings — ham, chicken, tongue, olives, nuts — all built on the same logic: use up cold cooked meat from a larger joint, bind it with a made sauce from another page of the book, and cut it small enough to eat standing up with a cup of tea in the other hand. The cross-references are the point. A late-nineteenth-century cook was expected to have mastered mayonnaise and its variations early in the book, and the sandwich section simply calls them in by name. Boiled ham was the workhorse of that pantry: a large ham was simmered, served hot, sliced cold, and then chopped for exactly this sort of thing until it was gone.