Ham Loaf: or, The recipe was fine except for the directions

I'm kind of impressed that today's recipe came so close to success and failed so hard.

Ham Loaf 3 cups chopped ham 1 cup breadcrumbs 2 eggs 3 tbsp chopped celery 2 tbsp chopped onions ½ tsp salt ½ tsp poultry seasoning* ½ tsp paprika ⅓ cup milk Heat oven to 350°. Grease a square pan. Mix everything together. Place into pan and form into a loaf. Add half an inch of water. Cover the pan with foil if it doesn't have a lid. Bake one hour. Baste while baking.† Allow to rest 10 minutes before uncovering and serving. *Didn't have that, so I used sage instead. †I absolutely did not baste this. Source: "Helping the Homemaker," Fort Worth (Texas) Star-Telegram page 6, January 6 1934

"Helping the Homemaker," Fort Worth Star-Telegram page 6, January 6 1934,

You may think I'm about to write that we still had leftover ham from the holidays, but in reality we bought a ham on clearance... twelve months ago. My objections of "We'll never eat this thing!" got drowned out by "But it's 45¢ a pound!" The ham has reposed in the chest freezer ever since. But apparently, this is the season for leftover ham. "Helping the Homemaker" published this recipe only a few days before we made it. 

The freshly-defrosted ham was peculiarly mushy after a year in the bottom of the freezer, but the main problem was the unrelenting brine. I say this as someone who likes salt far too much that I cook spaghetti in literal seawater when I get the chance. One can blame the prolonged freezing for the less-than-optimal texture, but I know of no chemical process by which salt spontaneously forms in frozen meat. I would have been irked because this ham was supposed to be one of the "good" brands, but it was 80% off when we bought it. Perhaps no one else at the store wanted to buy a 20 pound hunk of bone-in salt pork.

At any rate, this seemed like a perfect chance to shove the ham into a meat grinder and try one of these "ham loaves." You see them a lot in old cookbooks, but people seem to have stopped making them a few decades ago. I guess we all stopped having a serving hams throughout the year. If you think about it, most of us only bring out a ham for Thanksgiving, Christmas, and maybe Easter. But a short glance through old recipes and refrigerator ads suggests that leftover ham was a more frequent option back in the day.

Anyway, since no one wanted to brine themselves from the inside out by eating this ham, no objections were raised to pulverizing a sizable hunk of it. The ham loaf in progress generated a moderate amount of interest. When I handed over the recipe to curious inquirers to read while I shoved ham into the meat grinder, one person said "So you're basically making homemade Spam?"

Our ham loaf immediately lost a lot of its appeal.

The recipe calls for bread crumbs and milk. We had neither stale bread nor a canister of crumbs, so I decided to use the milk from the ingredients list to soak the heels of our sandwich bread. I always economize by making sure to eat rather than discard the bread heels, but it was nice to forestall at least one future heel sandwich. This would be the only time today's edition of "Helping the Homemaker" lived up to its title.

After our ham was pulverized and the rest of our ingredients were chopped, this recipe went the same as any other meatloaf. You put everything into a bowl, get your hands in there, and act like Fanny Cradock making a fruitcake.

I had reservations about this recipe after it was ready to bake. First, our loaf really wanted to fall apart. I doubted that the single alotted egg (we're halving the recipe) would miraculously bind it in the oven. Also, for reasons I do not pretend to understand, we are directed to flood the pan with a half-inch of water. While this step mystified me, I decided that the people behind "Helping the Homemaker" added it for a reason and I wasn't going to dispute their directions.

Since our unbaked loaf contained no raw meat, I saw no harm in tasting a small sample. Despite "Helping the Homemaker's" best attempts at seasonings, you couldn't tell that I had gotten out a single spice shaker. I thought that perhaps the spices would get drawn out as this baked for a whole hour.

"Helping the Homemaker" directs us to cover the pan and also to baste it. I made the executive decision that I'm not the sort of person who bastes a log of leftover ham. I figured that the steam dripping from the foil would automatically baste the loaf for me. After the loaf's hour was elapsed (plus additional resting time), we peeled back the foil to reveal... this.

After recovering from the initial disgust, I took the time to truly behold my creation. I was surprised at how much fat rendered off as the loaf baked. I thought I had gotten all of the fat off the ham before putting it into the grinder. Perhaps all the water was there to render out the fat. (After all, who wants a greasy ham loaf?)

To my complete lack of surprise, this log of compressed meat fell apart as soon as I tried to lift it out.

The people behind "Helping the Homemaker" got all the right ingredients together, but didn't know what to do with them.The ham loaf tasted better than it looked. All of the ingredients go well together. If this didn't look so terrible, I would have said this was a perfectly nice, reasonably economical supper recipe to serve in 1934. However, loafing our leftover ham was pointless. I would have dumped the entire mixture into a frying pan and cooked until hot. 

I can only speculate that in 1934, hot hash was old-fashioned and "messy." The 1930s were the early days of entrapping one's hitherto untidy salads into geometrically perfect gelatin molds. Perhaps loafing everything was the most modern, aesthetically-pleasing way to force your sloppy-looking ingredients into rectangle-shaped order.

Ugliness aside, I didn't throw the leftovers away. They seemed like they'd be really good served with eggs. And so, I microwaved a bit of our disintegrated ham loaf and then put it into an omelet (with cheese, of course). The remains of our featured recipe looked like they landed on the eggs by accident, though.

The ham got a lot less frightful after unloafing it, and it's hard to go wrong with ham eggs and cheese.

If you have leftover ham you want to unload, this isn't a bad way to repurpose it. Just ignore all the instructions that come after you've mixed everything together. Instead of baking a soggy loaf, put your pulverized ham into a frying pan instead.

I'm surprised that "Helping the Homemaker" had such a bad recipe. Everything else we've made from that column has been plain but good. Although our ham loaf tasted perfectly fine, I hate to imagine any woman in 1934 pulling this out of the oven and grimly realizing she has to convince her family that yes, this really is what's for dinner. 

So, while I don't recommend compressing your ham into a loaf, the ingredients are pretty decent if you put them in a hot frying pan instead- especially if you have them with scrambled eggs. If you insist on following the recipe directions instead of simply using the ingredient list, no amount of dim candlelight will make this ham loaf look pretty.