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Automobile Sandwich
Run through the meat chopper two pounds of cold boiled ham, half a pound of walnut meats, and four dill pickles. Mix with a little French mustard, and place between slices of lightly buttered bread.
A potted-ham spread built for travel: coarse, salty and firm enough not to leak through the bread. The proportions are generous, so scale down unless you are feeding a crowd.
- YieldTwo pounds of ham plus nuts and pickles makes roughly 5 cups of filling, enough for 20 to 24 sandwiches. Quarter the recipe for four or five.
- Meat chopperThe hand-cranked chopper produced a coarse, uneven grind. A food processor pulsed six or eight times gets close; run it continuously and you have paste. Chop the walnuts and pickles separately from the ham so the nuts keep some texture.
- French mustardIn American cookbooks of this period the term generally meant a smooth, vinegar-sharp prepared mustard of the Dijon type rather than the sweetened yellow sort. Dijon is the closest substitute; start with a tablespoon per pound of ham and taste.
- Drain the picklesThe hinge of the recipe. Dill pickles carry a lot of brine, and undrained they turn the filling wet and soak the bread within an hour. Chop, then press in a sieve or squeeze in a towel before mixing.
- Cold boiled hamAny cooked ham works, but a firm, lightly smoked one holds up best. Deli ham sliced thin is fine if you chop rather than process it. Skip added salt entirely; between ham and pickle the filling is already well seasoned.
- WalnutsHalf a pound to two pounds of ham is a high nut ratio and the walnuts will go soft if the filling sits overnight. Toast them briefly for flavour and add them the same day you serve.
- Bread and butterThe thin butter layer is structural, not decorative: it waterproofs the crumb. Use a close-grained white or firm wheat sandwich loaf, butter to the edges, and cut off the crusts if you want the period effect.
- KeepingThe filling holds three or four days covered in the refrigerator, which is longer than the original could have assumed. Assembled sandwiches are best eaten within a few hours.
This comes from Eva Greene Fuller's Up-to-Date Sandwich Book, published in Chicago in 1909, at a moment when the motor car was making the picnic a more widely available pleasure. The name may well have been a claim about the sandwich's behaviour rather than its ingredients: a stiff, chopped, well-salted filling with no mayonnaise or fresh tomato in it would sit in a basket for a couple of hours without turning to mush. Chopped sandwich fillings of this kind depended on the hand meat chopper clamped to the table edge, a device already in wide household use before the 1900s, which let households turn leftover boiled ham into something that spread. "French mustard" appears in American cookbooks of the period as shorthand for the smooth prepared mustards then available to grocers.