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Ham Sandwich Filling
Chop very fine the meat from the shank of boiled ham. Mix with enough boiled salad dressing (see page 75) to make thick paste. Pack in glass jar. This will keep in a cold place for a long time.
Poached Egg on Yankee Toast While the eggs are poaching, carefully brown some neatly trimmed slices of bread in a little bacon fat. Crush a slice of cold, crisp bacon, and sprinkle a very little on each slice of toast, and serve the egg on top. Shred a leaf or two of crisp lettuce very fine and garnish the top of each egg.
Two short recipes run together here: a potted ham spread and a breakfast dish of poached egg on bacon-fat toast. Both are straightforward; the only real problem is the storage advice.
- Ignore "will keep for a long time"This was written for an unheated pantry or icebox, and a cooked meat paste is exactly the kind of food that supports growth of Listeria and other organisms at cellar temperatures. Refrigerate it at or below 40F and use it within three or four days, or freeze it in small portions.
- Boiled salad dressingNot mayonnaise. It is a cooked dressing thickened with egg and flour or cornstarch, sharpened with vinegar and mustard, and it is tangier and stiffer than mayonnaise. A thick homemade cooked dressing is closest; commercial "salad dressing" of the Miracle Whip type is the surviving descendant and works.
- The shankThe shank end of a boiled ham is sinewy and awkward to slice, which is probably why it went into fillings. Pick out gristle and tough connective tissue before chopping, or the paste will be stringy.
- Chopping"Very fine" would have meant a chopping bowl and a long time. A food processor does it in seconds, but pulse rather than run it, or you get a smooth pink puree instead of a paste with texture.
- Proportions and yieldProportions -- The recipe gives no quantities. About two cups of chopped ham to a third of a cup of dressing gives a spreadable paste; add more dressing a spoonful at a time.
- Yankee toastSimply bread browned in bacon fat rather than dry-toasted. Use a moderate heat in a skillet so the crumb dries as the surface colors.
- PoachingBarely simmering water, a splash of vinegar, and three minutes for a set white with a liquid yolk. Drain each egg on a towel before it goes on the toast or the fried bread turns soggy.
Chopped-ham spreads like this are the ancestors of commercial deviled ham, which was being sold in tins in the United States from the later nineteenth century onward; the household version simply did at home what the canner did at scale. Books of this kind treated the odd ends of a boiled ham as an accounting problem: the shank was paid for, so it had to appear on the table in some form, and a jar of filling turned an unsliceable scrap into lunch. The pairing with "boiled" salad dressing is also period-specific. Cooked dressings were cheaper than mayonnaise, since they stretched one or two eggs with flour and vinegar, and they were often said to keep better in a kitchen without reliable refrigeration, which may be the source of the confident claim that the jar would last a long time in a cold place.