Crow's Culinary Abominations: HAMFISH
Friends, comrades... it's time for a new culinary horror. After the unexpected popularity of the salmon mousse, both here and among the poor depraved souls I served it to, I knew I had to keep making more nightmare fuel unconventional recipes. I've gotten many wonderful and horrible suggestions from people here, so thank you so much for that! If you have any weird recipes that make you question all your life choices and wish you could un-see the ingredients list, feel free to send them my way. I can't guarantee that I'll make all of them, but I still love seeing them.
This time, I decided to go for a childhood favorite. While I consider it delicious and nostalgic, I expect it's still an abomination to people who didn't grow up on it. It's salty. It's spreadable. It's a horrible, pureed flesh color. It may or may not be harvested straight from the meaty pits of hell. That's right... this week, we're making deviled ham.
Listen... I don't want to oversell this stuff. It's meat paste. It looks, smells, and presumably tastes like canned cat food. But spread on toasted bread with a slice of cheese and some mustard, it's actually delicious. Delicious in a way that leaves you questioning what your life has come to, while your cats try desperately to steal your sandwich because they're fully convinced that your filling of choice is just straight up Fancy Feast, but delicious nonetheless.
In its canned form, this stuff has actually been around since the 1860s! Honestly, the old branding was so much better.
I had already been quietly scheming about deviled ham for a while when one of my friends dropped this in the chat, no context:
All the pieces started falling into place. Chilled ham paste is pretty dang sculptable. So there's no reason, theoretically, why I can't turn a humble bowl of Satan's meat puree into... HAMFISH.
The chat loved the idea, obviously. So yesterday I purchased seven pounds of suspiciously cheap ham*, and today... we make HAMFISH.
*(don't worry, this will not result in seven pounds of HAMFISH. Even I'm not that invested in deviled ham. The extra will be frozen for future eating in regular boring ham format. Fun fact, February is a great time to find suspiciously cheap ham because many grocery stores are experiencing the "we ordered too many Christmas hams and need to sell them before they expire" panic. My ham is maybe already slightly past its prime. But it's fine. Slightly dubious meat feels like the right choice for this dish.)
There are a ton of recipes out there for homemade deviled ham. There's also ham salad, which is basically the same thing but chunky. I don't know if the chunks make it better or worse than the smooth flesh paste, honestly. There wasn't any one particular recipe that really stood out to me, so I decided to make my own based loosely on the recipes I read.
Mayonnaise (most recipes call for about 3/4 cup mayo to 4 cups ham cubes. I'm just gonna wing it.)
Pickled jalapeños (and a little of the brine from the jar)
Spices (garlic powder and smoked paprika for me, but honestly, use whatever your heart desires)
Mustard (this is on the list because I do consider it an essential deviled ham seasoning. Ordinarily, I would put so much mustard in this HAMFISH. But I want to make this at least slightly edible for @tamber-tales, and they would never so much as taste it if I added mustard. It's very sad, really. But there will be plenty of mustard sauce on the side, for those of us who understand how delicious it is.)
Stay tuned for the horrors!
