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Hot Devilled Ham
6 rounds white bread cut 1/4 inch thick 1/2 cup devilled ham or finely 1 tablespoon chow-chow 1 tablespoon Mazola Mayonnaise minced cooked ham Grated cheese Small sweet pickles Fry the bread in deep Mazola hot enough to brown it in forty counts, drain on crumpled paper and spread with the devilled ham mixed to a paste with the chow-chow and mayonnaise. Cover with grated cheese and place in a hot oven till the cheese melts. Decorate with the sweet pickles and parsley.
A branded-oil pamphlet recipe for what we would now call a canapé or hot open sandwich. The whole thing takes about fifteen minutes, and the only real technique is getting the fried bread crisp rather than greasy.
- "Forty counts"The old test for frying fat, a round or cube of bread browning while the cook counted, taken as roughly forty seconds. Period tables put that at something like 375-400F, hotter than the 60-second doughnut test. Any cooler and the bread drinks oil; hotter and the outside colours before the centre dries.
- MazolaCorn oil, then a relatively new product and the reason this book exists. Any neutral high-smoke-point oil does the same job. "Mazola Mayonnaise" simply means mayonnaise made with corn oil — a jar of plain mayonnaise is fine.
- Hot ovenConventionally read as somewhere around 400-450F. The bread is already cooked and crisp, so this is only a short blast to melt the cheese -- two or three minutes. A broiler set a few inches below the element works better and is quicker.
- Devilled hamCanned deviled ham spread, sold since the late nineteenth century, or the recipe's own alternative of finely minced cooked ham. If using minced ham, it will need help: a little mustard and cayenne bring it closer to the seasoned canned product.
- Chow-chowA mixed pickle relish, chopped fine; some versions are mustard-based, others sweet-sour or cabbage-based. A sharp mustard pickle or piccalilli substitutes well here; a plain sweet relish will leave the paste flat.
- Grated cheeseUnspecified, as usual in this period, and almost certainly a firm dry cheese meant for grating. A sharp cheddar melts well and stands up to the pickle.
- BreadQuarter-inch slices cut into rounds with a cutter. Slightly stale bread fries crisper and absorbs less oil than fresh.
- YieldSix rounds — a first course or savoury for three, or a plate of cocktail canapés for a few more if cut smaller. Serve immediately; the bread softens under the topping within minutes.
This comes from the era of the branded cookbook, when a manufacturer published a small volume of recipes whose real purpose was to establish a new product in the home kitchen. Mazola corn oil was introduced by the Corn Products Refining Company in the early twentieth century, and pamphlets like this one worked to persuade cooks that a bottled vegetable oil could replace lard and butter for frying, and could carry a mayonnaise as well. The dish itself belongs to a family of hot savouries — small, sharply seasoned things on fried or toasted bread — that filled out Edwardian and early American dinner menus at either end of the meal. Deviled ham, meaning ham pounded with mustard and cayenne, had been sold in tins in the United States since the 1860s, and "devilled" in this sense is generally traced to eighteenth-century English usage for anything highly spiced and grilled. Chow-chow, the mustard pickle that sharpens the paste here, has a contested origin — the name itself is usually linked to Chinese or Anglo-Indian usage, while one account among several traces the pickle to a mix of British piccalilli traditions and Pennsylvania and Southern preserving practice — but by 1900 it was a pantry staple rather than a novelty.