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Minced Ham or Tongue Sandwiches
Add enough Mazola Mayonnaise to minced ham or tongue to allow it to spread easily. Make small sandwiches and fry first on one side, then the other, in Mazola.
A two-line formula from a corn-oil promotional cookbook, written on the assumption that the cook already knows how a fried sandwich should look. The proportions are left entirely to judgement, so the notes below fill in what the original leaves out.
- Mazola is corn oilMazola was, and is, refined corn oil. Any neutral oil with a high smoke point works identically here; the book names the brand because the brand paid for the book.
- Mazola MayonnaiseA mayonnaise made with corn oil rather than olive. Ordinary jarred mayonnaise is a direct substitute.
- How much mayonnaiseEnough to bind, not to soak — roughly 2 to 3 tablespoons per cup of minced meat. Excess mayonnaise breaks in the pan and weeps out of the edges as oil.
- The meatMinced ham means cooked ham chopped fine, not ground raw pork. Tongue means cooked, peeled beef tongue, which most butchers will still order; cooked corned beef or a good boiled ham stands in without complaint.
- Bread and size"Small sandwiches" most likely means thin-sliced bread, crusts trimmed, cut into quarters or fingers, though the recipe does not say. Thick modern sandwich bread will not crisp through in the time the filling needs to warm.
- Heat and depthMedium heat, a film of oil about an eighth of an inch deep. Too hot and the outside colours before the filling warms; press the sandwich lightly with a spatula so the whole face touches the pan.
- Seal the edgesThe one thing that makes or breaks these: press the two slices together firmly around the border before frying, or the filling escapes and burns in the oil.
- YieldA cup of minced meat fills about four full sandwiches, which cut into sixteen small ones — enough for four at luncheon. Serve immediately; they go leathery as they cool.
This comes from a genre of cookbook that flourished in the first decades of the twentieth century: the manufacturer's recipe pamphlet, published to teach American cooks what to do with a new industrial product. Corn oil was a by-product of corn starch milling, and Mazola was introduced by the Corn Products Refining Company in the 1910s as a cheaper, more neutral alternative to olive oil and to rendered animal fats. The dish itself belongs to the era's luncheon table, where minced-meat sandwiches, potted tongue and other ways of using up cooked cold meat were staples of the light midday meal. Frying the sandwich rather than serving it cold is the pamphlet's argument in miniature: here is one more thing you could be buying oil for. Boiled beef tongue, an everyday cut then and a specialty item now, is the clearest marker of the recipe's age.