The Ladies Home Journal's Ham
Among all the women’s magazines, Ladies Home Journal had the most ambitious ham menu. The magazine had promoted its food editor, Ann Batchelder, as the best known and most trusted food expert of the day (at least among those experts who were not fictional characters like Betty Crocker) soon after she joined the magazine in 1934. Prior to this, she had been food editor at the venerable Delineator magazine, which had ceased publication. A Vermont native in her sixties, Miss Batchelder published a couple of books of poetry as well as several cookbooks and was notable enough to be listed in Who’s Who in 1946.
She took a decorative approach to Easter in the April issue of Ladies Home Journal, setting her holiday table with dyed Easter eggs (before Truman had denounced the practice as wasteful) set in paraffin. She began the meal with tomato cheese ice, a frozen savory ice cream-like concoction made of blue cheese, cream cheese, grated onion, Worcester sauce, salt, pepper, lemon juice, tomato juice and egg whites and served in egg cups or small sherbet glasses. She suggested egg canapés, first sieving the hardboiled egg yolks and mixing with mayonnaise flavored with several ingredients, then spreading this mixture on toasts, topping it with egg white slices and then piping more of the egg yolk mixture on top of that. She garnished each canapé with tiny strips of green pepper. The consumption of fat and cholesterol was not a major concern back then.
She recommended that readers follow their usual recipe for baked ham but she had a new glaze for them to try. It included mustard, water, sugar and currant jelly. She said you could substitute another tart jelly but not, God forbid, mint jelly, which she warned would be “terrible.” She added syrup from a pickled fruit, such as crab apple, heated it all together and then basted the skinned and scored ham with the mix. When the ham was done, she decorated it with “flowers” made of cloves and blanched almond petals. To go the extra mile, she suggested decorating alternate squares of the scored ham with strips of angelica or tinted citron. She garnished the platter with “daffodils” made of turnips and carrots.
This fancy dress ham was accompanied by traditional fixings of creamed new potatoes with horseradish, fresh asparagus, pickled crab apples, chutney and hot rolls. She served an avocado salad. No recipes were provided for any of the above although elsewhere in her "Line a Day" feature in the same issue, she entered the debate on the proper method for cooking asparagus, recommending breaking, not cutting, the asparagus spears and then cooking them standing heads up.
Gelatin entered the menu as a jellied apricot and banana ring dessert, constructed with two gelatins, one made with canned apricots and apricot syrup and another with mashed bananas and boiled custard. She served the ring with a chilled lemon cream sauce made with lemon juice, sugar and lemon rind. Alas, the sauce recipe also called for Truman-banned whipped cream. But resourceful housewives of the day knew from wartime that you could whip up evaporated milk, if you could find some in your pantry or grocer’s shelves.