Home › Meat › Hot Ham Sandwich
Hot Ham Sandwich
Spread thin slices of white bread with chopped cold boiled ham, over same spread a little mustard, and cover with another slice. Beat an egg and add one-half cup of milk, and in this mixture dip the sandwiches. Garnish with parsley and a pickle.
A short entry with a step missing: the sandwich is dipped in egg and milk and then, in the original text, apparently served. The title tells you what was meant to happen in between.
- The missing stepThe dipped sandwiches were presumably fried in a hot pan until the coating is set and golden; the book gives no fat, heat or time. The batter is raw egg and milk and cannot be left uncooked; the word "Hot" in the title is the only clue the book gives that a pan is involved.
- Egg batter quantityOne egg to half a cup of milk is a modest amount of dipping liquid; how far it goes depends on how thin the slices are and how long they soak. The ratio is much the same as a plain French toast batter.
- Bread choiceThin slices of a close-crumbed white sandwich loaf hold up best. Airy modern bread turns to paste in the batter; if that is all you have, let the slices stale uncovered for an hour first.
- "Cold boiled ham"A ham or a piece of one simmered in water and left to cool, then chopped. Thick-cut deli ham, chopped or minced, is the practical stand-in; avoid glazed or honey-cured varieties, which fight the mustard.
- MustardA sharp English or a plain prepared yellow suits this better than a grainy or sweetened one. Use it sparingly, as the recipe says ("a little mustard"): a wet filling will leak into the batter.
- Seal the edgesPress the closed sandwich firmly at the rim before dipping, or trim the crusts and press with a fork. Chopped filling escapes into the pan otherwise and burns in the butter.
- ServingCut into halves or triangles and serve at once with the parsley and pickle; the coating goes leathery within a few minutes of leaving the pan. Figure one sandwich per person as a light lunch.
Sandwich books were a small publishing genre in the first decades of the twentieth century, when afternoon teas, card parties and luncheon clubs created steady demand for something more inventive than bread and butter. Egg-dipped fried sandwiches of this kind have relatives on both sides of the Atlantic, from enriched fried bread to the later American Monte Cristo, though no direct line of descent can be traced. A cold boiled ham was a common larder item of the period, and chopping rather than slicing it suits odds and ends, but the recipe itself says nothing about thrift. The parsley and pickle are conventional garnishes of the era.