Salad Days: A Study In Pink

This is ham salad.

Ham salad is unlikely to win any beauty pageants, if such a thing were to be held among sandwich fillings. It is an old-fashioned, fuddy-duddy of a sandwich spread, popular these days mainly among the elderly who recall its, well, its salad days. If you live in America–well, in certain parts of America, let’s say: the Rust Belt, the South, the Midwest and Great Plains, those parts that the coastal contingents call flyover states–you’ve probably seen it, though you may not have noticed it at the time. I myself was only vaguely aware of it until a few years ago when I wrote about the nightmarish Sandwich Loaf and filled one layer with a rendition purchased at a supermarket deli in my hometown.

Since then, I’ve noticed it everywhere. It’s a common sight at delis, even in the Chicago area–not only supermarket delis, but liquor store delis, Italian delis, any deli serving an aging population that is not pork-averse. I even wrote briefly about a ham salad sandwich I bought at a very old-fashioned little deli in my hometown called Winking’s Market.

I’ve searched for its origins and have found mixed results. Wikipedia says that it originates in the American Midwest and South but then also calls it British, Canadian, and Australian as well. Atlas Obscura mostly references it as a nostalgic food known mainly from mid-Century funeral luncheons. A blog called Momoe’s Cupboard states that it originated from Western Pennsylvania and Northern Ohio. Yet another blog, Vintage Recipe Tin, seems fairly sure that it originated in the 1920s. I have found recipes for ham salad from as far back as the late 19th Century though.

One thing that most sources seem to agree on though is the impetus behind ham salad–it probably came about as a way to use up leftover ham, and continues to be useful for exactly that purpose today. And despite the fact that you can now find a mommy blog with a colorful photos and florid descriptions of a dish to use up any leftover you might conceivably find in your kitchen, it was less common a couple hundred years ago to publish such mundanities. Mayonnaise came about when the French invaded Spain and discovered aioli in the 18th Century; salad cream originated in England during the Victorian era; boiled dressing was invented by American cooks in the 19th Century who didn’t have the equipment or the patience to make mayonnaise; but nobody has really recorded who first thought of chopping meats into tiny bits and mixing it with those dressings, or when it happened, or why.

Ham salad is good though, simple, a balance between the savory and salty flavor of the chopped ham and the sweet and sour flavor of a sweet pickle relish. All that it really needs besides those two ingredients is a little mayonnaise to bind them together. However, some celery for crunch would not be amiss, nor would a small amount of a less pungent onion variety and maybe a dash of mustard for a little complexity. Excessive spices can be and are used, but are unnecessary, as are spicier and more savory additions such as hot sauce or Worcestershire. If your ham salad is too savory and spicy, it is not ham salad, it is deviled ham.

When it comes to a ham salad sandwich, the salad itself contains everything that is needed. However, it doesn’t hurt to add some complementary ingredients. For ham salad, I like to use a good multigrain bread, and dress the sandwich with mayonnaise, tomato, and lettuce so that the sweet and savory balance of the ham salad is not overwhelmed.

However, there will be as many recipes for ham salad sandwiches as there are people eating them.

This is “baloney” salad. Otherwise known as bologna salad. Otherwise known as… ham salad.

Yes, sometimes ham salad is made with bologna, and still called ham salad so as not to offend. Others proudly call it bologna salad, or even the Americanized “baloney” salad, and the nostalgia surrounding the dish is, if anything even stronger than that for actual ham salad. Writing about bologna salad in her excellent newsletter The Sword and the Sandwich recently, friend of the site Talia Lavin said “Bologna salad is gross, but evocatively so.” More than many relics of a questionable culinary upbringing, bologna salad tastes like home to a wider swathe of America than I suspected.

I am not one of them; it was entirely new to me. However, after some fiddling around, I found a formula that worked for me–garlic bologna with a chopped-up hard-boiled egg, sweet pickle relish, Miracle Whip, yellow mustard, celery, and red onion. I served it as I normally serve a cold bologna sandwich: on squishy white bread with Miracle Whip, yellow mustard, and a slice of Land ‘O Lakes American cheese.

It is not likely to replace ham salad in, well, whatever small corner of my affections are reserved for ham salad. But I can see the appeal. The texture of cold bologna is not one of its strengths–it is in fact the opposite, one of the more horrifying things about bologna as a lunchmeat. But by chopping up the bologna and mixing in a variety of other ingredients, the texture of bologna takes a backseat to other textural elements–the crispness of the celery, the onion, the pickle relish. Using garlic bologna and the pungent yellow mustard lends some complexity to the flavor, and the Miracle Whip helps balance that back toward sweetness as with the ham salad.

Other lunchmeats are often used in this way too–SPAM is a favorite of some, or Old Fashioned Loaf, or the coarser, more summer sausage-like ring bolognas. But what about… hot dogs? Could someone make a hot dog salad? That thought came into my head earlier this month and would not leave.

I have given the idea more of my attention than it probably deserves over the past couple of weeks. It seems to me that a hot dog is not simply an encased forcemeat, a Frankfurter or Wiener–chop up one of those and you have a frankfurter salad, a wiener salad, but not a hot dog salad. A hot dog is whatever you get when you order a “hot dog”–i.e., whatever local rendition of sausage-inna-bun the words “hot dog” describe in your area. In New York it would be a dirty-water dog with mustard, onions, and sauerkraut. In West Virginia and North Carolina it would be a red hot with chili, coleslaw, and mustard.

I live in the south suburbs of Chicago, though. This is what a hot dog looks like around here:

This is a (homemade) version of the classic dragged-through-the-garden style of Chicago hot dog: a steamed Vienna Beef sausage in a steamed poppyseed bun with yellow mustard, chopped yellow onion, dayglo green pickle relish, a dill pickle spear, slices or wedges of tomato, celery salt, pickled sport peppers, and perhaps the most important ingredient of all: the absence of ketchup.

Do not take me wrong: I personally don’t care whether you put ketchup on your hot dog–eat your sausage however you enjoy it. But that is maybe the chief defining characteristic of the Chicago dog. Some places may not use Vienna Beef sausages; the relish at other places may lack that distinctive bright green hue; still others may use a slice of cucumber instead of a pickle, or a wedge of pickled green tomato instead of a slice of fresh tomato. I can’t think of a single place that will put ketchup on a hot dog and tell you it is Chicago-style though.

So I chopped up some Vienna Beef hot dogs (and a boiled egg to help the meat stretch further, an important part of making a lunchmeat salad spread) along with a proportional amount of onion, dill pickle, and sport pepper, and pulsed them all together in a food processor. Only after removing the mixture from the food process did I add diced tomatoes–processing the tomatoes would have skirted too close to the hard “no ketchup” boundary–dayglo green pickle relish, celery salt, yellow mustard, and just a little bit of mayonnaise to help bind it all together.

Now, you all know I hope that I am not afraid to tell you when one of my stupid ideas turns out to be a failure. I fully expected this one to go that way. I couldn’t be more excited to tell you that, instead, it turned out to be unexpectedly delicious. Just ridiculously good.

I mean, it looks like a pile of vomit, in the best tradition of the lunchmeat salad spread. It isn’t particularly pink, given the higher percentage of non-meat ingredients. This also is canonical for the Chicago-style hot dog. The pickle spear by itself is nearly as big as the relatively small wieners commonly used in a Chicago dog, and between that, the tomato, the onion, relish, and sport peppers, a Chicago dog is not called a salad in a bun for no reason.

In a typical Chicago dog the standard soft steamed poppyseed bun is provided structure by the rigidity of sausage, pickle, etc. Since none of that structure is available when all the ingredients have been chopped into tiny bits, I toasted the bun instead. The contrast of textures between the soft egg and sausage and tomato, the crunch of the pickles and onions, and the crisply toasted bread was a feature of this sandwich. But more than anything, Chicago-style hot dog salad is a reminder of what a great balance of flavors a Chicago dog represents. Savory sausage, sweet relish, sour pickle, spicy pepper, pungent mustard and onion, the salty-sweet-umami punch of the tomato and celery salt combo, each of these flashes in rapid succession across the tongue.

It’s wetter than a ham salad or even a bologna salad, and won’t keep as well–the tomatoes especially will make it break down more quickly I think. But Chicago-style hot dog salad was a worthy experiment, and I’m glad I tried it. If you decide to make it at home though, please keep in mind–a little goes a long way. I have about a quart each of ham salad and bologna salad and another pint of hot dog salad and there’s no way I’m going to be able to finish it all. Anybody hungry?

@sandwichidiot Ham Salad / “Baloney” Salad #hamsalad #bolognasalad #hamsaladsandwich #baloneysandwich #sandwichtribunal ♬ original sound – Jim Behymer

@sandwichidiot Salad Days Part 2: Chicago-style hot dog salad. #chicagohotdog #saladinabun #dumbidea #delicious #sandwichtribunal ♬ original sound – Jim Behymer