Stag Sandwich
Run cold boiled ham and dill pickle through the meat chopper, add a little French mustard, and spread on thin slices of lightly buttered white bread. Cover with another slice.
A ham salad spread in all but name, from an era when the hand-cranked meat chopper did the work of a food processor. The only real decisions are texture and moisture.
- French mustardIn 1909 this meant a smooth, vinegar-based prepared mustard of the Dijon type, not the bright yellow American ballpark style. Dijon is the direct substitute; a teaspoon or so per cup of ground ham is plenty.
- Meat chopperA hand-cranked grinder; the recipe doesn't say which plate, but a coarse one suits a spread. A food processor pulsed a few times gives the closest result — run it continuously and you get paste rather than a spread that holds its shape.
- Drain the pickleGrind the pickle separately and squeeze it in a towel before mixing. Dill brine will otherwise soak into the buttered bread.
- ProportionsThe original gives none. Roughly three parts ham to one part pickle by volume suits most palates; more pickle than that and the filling turns sour and wet.
- The butter is structural"Lightly buttered" is best read as a thin film on the cut face of each slice; besides flavour, it helps keep the bread from absorbing moisture from the filling, so don't skip it in the interest of lightness.
- YieldA cup of ground ham plus its pickle fills about four sandwiches cut in halves, or eight to twelve fingers if you are trimming crusts for a tray.
- Ham to useCold boiled ham means a wet-cured, fully cooked ham — deli ham off the bone works, as do trimmings and end pieces.
The Up-to-Date Sandwich Book belongs to a brief American publishing vogue, roughly 1900 to 1920, for volumes devoted entirely to sandwiches, a fashion often linked to the rise of the afternoon tea, the club luncheon and the packed lunch pail. Names in these collections tend to signal an occasion rather than an origin, and "stag" is generally taken to mean a men-only gathering — the stag party or stag dinner — where sharp, salty, mustard-heavy fillings were thought more suitable than the cucumber and cream cheese offered to mixed company. The ham-and-pickle combination itself long predates the book: grinding cured meat with something acid and binding it into a spread was standard thrift in households that bought ham on the bone, and the same idea was sold commercially as deviled or potted ham. What dates this version is the equipment. The mention of a meat chopper assumes a clamp-on cast-iron grinder, said to have been common in middle-class kitchens by then and the reason so many recipes of the period begin with the instruction to run something through it.