The Once Popular Mock Ham Sandwich Featured A Cheaper Meat Instead

During World War II, when the U.S. government rationed many foods, including pork and beef, families had to get creative in the kitchen. One way to do this was through swapping out ingredients, as with Ration Cake that didn't contain any eggs or dairy but instead relied on dried fruit. Likewise, there was a sandwich filling called mock ham salad that swapped out ham, which was rationed, for bologna, which wasn't. The ingredients included ground bologna, hard-boiled eggs, sweet pickles, and mayonnaise.

Bologna can be made from various emulsified meats that are then mixed with different spices. It's a sandwich meat that tends to be popular during difficult economic times because it's cheap, just one of many little-known bologna-related facts. Even so, mock ham sandwiches seemed to be popular into the 1950s (with the addition of green peppers) and beyond. A 1955 newspaper ad for Cushing's Pickles, which featured a smiling pickle in a top hat, included a recipe for mock ham salad. Who first came up with this sandwich and why it fell out of fashion are a bit of a mystery.

The first recipe we could find dates to a newspaper article from 1940 about feeding Red Cross volunteers, but it's likely mock ham salad sandwiches were around before this, perhaps under a different name. A 1928 cookbook, "Seven Hundred Sandwiches," by Florence A. Cowles, includes a recipe that combines equal parts chopped ham and bologna along with the other ingredients found in the 1940 recipe. This might suggest that in the intervening years of the Great Depression, the ham was swapped out for more bologna as a cost-cutting measure.

The dish continued to be enjoyed in the 1960s. In an April 1969 edition of the Salina Journal, the bargain-hunting food columnist Lil Johnson suggested making mock ham salad sandwiches as part of an Easter meal. Mock ham salad lived on into the 1980s, where it remained a school lunch item in some areas of the country. At some point, calling this sandwich filling "mock ham" fell out of fashion, but bologna salad sandwiches live on even here at Chowhound, where we've written about how to get the perfect texture for bologna salad.