Home › The World's Kitchen › Ham Club Sandwiches
Ham Club Sandwiches
Cut twelve thin slices bread, lightly butter and toast to a nice golden colour. Arrange six slices fresh broiled ham on top of six toasts, spread a very little mayonnaise over six cleaned and well-drained leaves lettuce, arrange over ham, with remaining six slices toast on top, neatly trim crusts all around, cut in triangular halves, dress on a dish, place in oven for a minute and serve.
A straightforward assembly job, but two details in the original will trip up a modern cook: the ham is broiled fresh rather than sliced from a deli, and the finished sandwich goes briefly back into the oven.
- "Fresh broiled ham"Most likely ham broiled to order rather than cold pressed sandwich ham. A ham steak, cooked hot through and browned at the edges, one slice per sandwich, matches the instruction; the original gives no thickness.
- Toast, then butterThe instruction is to butter first and toast after. In a modern toaster or under a broiler, butter the bread after toasting or it will scorch.
- The final minute in the ovenNo temperature is given; the original says only "place in oven for a minute." The point is to take the chill off the assembled sandwich and firm the toast, not to cook anything. Longer and the lettuce wilts into the mayonnaise and the whole thing sags.
- Drain the lettuce properlyThe original says "well-drained" and means it. Any water left on the leaves thins the mayonnaise and soaks through the toast within a minute.
- Mayonnaise, "a very little"Mayonnaise in a kitchen of this kind would have been made in-house. A thin scrape is correct; the ham supplies the salt.
- Trim before cuttingTrimming the crusts on all four sides while the sandwich is assembled and pressed, then cutting corner to corner, is what produces the clean triangles. Trimming after cutting tears the layers apart.
- YieldTwelve slices of bread make six single-decker sandwiches, or twelve triangles.
Despite the name, this is not the three-layer club sandwich associated with American hotel and country-club dining rooms, which used chicken or turkey with bacon and a middle slice of toast. Here the name is attached to a two-slice, trimmed, triangle-cut toast sandwich served on a dish. The genre belongs to the era of the hotel a la carte menu and the plated, garnished sandwich, where a cook working from a book like this one turned out neat identical triangles on demand.