Home › Sandwiches › Deviled Ham Sandwiches
Deviled Ham Sandwiches
Chop cold boiled ham very fine, fat and lean together. Measure, and for each cupful allow the yolks of two hard boiled eggs, one teaspoonful of lemon juice, one-quarter of a teaspoonful of mixed mustard and one tablespoonful of soft butter, add the mustard and work well together with the ham. Mash the eggs to a paste with the soft butter.
A potted-ham spread rather than a cooked dish, and the instructions arrive slightly out of order — read the last sentence first.
- SequenceMash the hard-boiled yolks with the soft butter into a smooth paste before anything else, then work that paste into the chopped ham along with the mustard and lemon juice. Following the sentences as printed leaves you trying to blend dry crumbled yolk into meat, which will not emulsify.
- "Deviled" hereNothing is cooked and nothing is fiery. In this period deviling meant seasoning with mustard and something sharp; a quarter teaspoon of mustard per cup of ham is very mild by modern taste and can be doubled without straying from the intent.
- Mixed mustardPrepared mustard, not powder — English or a smooth Dijon both work. If you use dry mustard powder, slake it in the lemon juice for ten minutes first or it will taste raw and bitter.
- Chopping"Very fine" meant hand-chopping on a board or a hand mincer. A food processor will do it in seconds but goes from spread to paste quickly; pulse rather than run it.
- Fat and lean togetherThe instruction is doing real work. The fat carries the seasoning and binds the mixture; a lean deli ham alone will give a dry, crumbly filling and needs extra butter to compensate.
- Ham to useCold boiled ham means a plain cooked joint rather than a honey-glazed or sugar-crusted one; a mildly smoked ham that has been boiled is entirely in keeping. A thick-cut piece from a whole cooked ham is closer than sliced sandwich ham, which is wetter and more heavily seasoned.
- YieldOne cup of chopped ham prepared this way fills roughly six to eight small sandwiches on thin white bread with the crusts trimmed.
- KeepingThe butter and the ham's own fat will firm up when chilled, so let it come back to cool room temperature to spread it thinly. Treat it as any cooked-meat salad and use it within two days.
Sandwich chapters expanded rapidly in American cookbooks around 1900, driven by afternoon teas, card parties and the new fashion for packed luncheons. The method is a domestic version of what canners were doing commercially: chopped ham bound with fat and sharpened with mustard, sold in small tins under the name deviled ham from the later nineteenth century onward. Deviling as a culinary term is usually traced to eighteenth-century England, where it is said to have meant to season highly with mustard, pepper or cayenne, the heat supplying the infernal joke. The hard-boiled yolk worked into butter is the older technique in the recipe u a standard way of thickening and enriching cold sauces and pastes long before mayonnaise became the default binder in American kitchens.