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Westphalia Ham for Side Dish
Procure six very tin slices of Westphalia ham, cut each in two slanting slices, twist each piece into cornet-like shape, arrange a little parsley greens in each cornet, place them on a side dish and serve.
An assembly rather than a cooked dish: twelve slanted half-slices of raw cured ham rolled into cones and filled with parsley. Everything depends on the ham and on the slicing.
- "Very tin slices"A printer's error for very thin. Ask the counter for prosciutto-thickness, near enough to see light through; anything approaching deli-sandwich thickness will not hold a cone and will chew like a strap.
- What Westphalia ham isA German dry-cured, juniper-smoked raw ham from the Westphalia region, eaten uncooked like prosciutto. Genuine Westfälischer Knochenschinken is sold in some German delicatessens; Black Forest ham, speck or prosciutto crudo all substitute honestly. A cooked pink sandwich ham is the wrong thing entirely.
- Cutting on the slantHalving each slice diagonally gives two long triangles. The narrow point becomes the tip of the cone and the wide edge the mouth, which may be why a slanting cut is specified rather than a straight halving.
- Making the cornets holdHam rolls best at cool room temperature, when the fat is pliable; straight from the refrigerator it cracks. Roll each triangle around a fingertip, overlap the edge, and stand the cones seam-side down in a shallow dish for twenty minutes to set before filling.
- The parsley"Parsley greens" means small picked sprigs, not chopped herb, arranged so the leaves fan out of the mouth of the cone. Curly parsley holds its shape better than flat-leaf here, which is likely what the author had.
- "Side dish" in this contextMost likely a cold hors d'oeuvre set on the table with others at the start of the meal, rather than a vegetable accompaniment to a roast. Serve with brown bread and butter.
- YieldTwelve cornets from six slices: enough for four to six as part of an assortment, or two as a plate on its own.
Westphalian ham was one of the small handful of German foods with an international luxury reputation in the nineteenth century, prized for the beechwood and juniper smoke of the Westphalia region and exported well beyond Germany. Its appearance in a "World's Kitchen" sort of chapter reflects the period's fashion for a spread of small cold hors d'oeuvre opening a formal dinner: anchovies, radishes, olives, canapes and rolled cured meats, each on its own small side dish. The cornet shape, a cone of thin meat with something green or creamy at its mouth, was a standard garde-manger trick of the era. Note how little the recipe explains, assuming a cook who could be told only the shape wanted and would supply the rest.