When I was young we would buy packages of Carl Buddig ham and turkey not for sandwiches but just snacked on as most was fed to the cat, although his favorite was round steak scraps for our chicken fried steak.
In high school I developed an affection for reubens so there was lots of corned beef.
I made them by the way, Mom was at work. Other lunch favorites were hamburgers pan fried or chargrilled and the classic grilled Kraft American sort of cheese on white bread.
Growing up in the 80s, Oscar Meyer bologna (pre-sliced from the round plastic package) was pretty standard fare in our house. My mom also had an old school hand-crank grinder she would use to make ham salad or roast beef salad out of dinner leftovers, although we kids wouldn’t touch it. Olive loaf, however, was a treat I only got at Grandma’s house! No idea why my parents wouldn’t buy it but I always enjoyed it when visiting Grandma. She served a wide variety of old-fashioned lunch meats, actually, but olive loaf was the only one I would eat. I remember my (pickier) siblings eating a lot of cheese and potato chip sandwiches at her house!
I didn’t even know ham salad was a thing until I saw it online in one of those “remember the 60s foods…?” types of lists. Can’t say I would have craved that. Was turning anything you didn’t finish into a salad or a pressed loaf something that common? I understand the drive to use all parts of an animal so you have head cheese, blood sausage and more interesting foods, but beef salad? Ham salad? Liver loaf… 
Yes…but that is what this site overall is about…
I never had blood sausage until I was seventeen when an Argentine family moved into our community…at their barbecue…I LOVED IT!!
Yes. That’s exactly what we did.
[quote=“kobuta, post:45, topic:16263”]
I didn’t even know ham salad was a thing
[/quote]I find ham salad delicious and would be happy to skip the baked ham dinner and go straight to the salad.
Good stuff that black pudding, if hard to find in the States.
Mom made scrumptious head cheese in the loaf pan using pork hocks and chicken liver. Sometimes we made school lunch sandwich with liverwurst (also [mis]-labeled braunschweiger) (both also went well with Ritz crackers).
I’m actually a big fan of liverwurst, though I haven’t had it in years. For the sake of my waist line, I’ve refrained from jumping back in.
I love blood sausage, and in traditional Chinese cooking pig and ducks blood (coagulated) is not unusual. I really used to love that too. I like Korean blood sausage, but was blown away by a German version when I was in Wuerzberg for work. Even got my coworkers to like it!
Thank you! “Now a days” ( is that okay to use?) it’s occassiinally something mass-produced -sealed-in-plastic-with-a-use-by-date, but mostly the “house made” stuff at an upscale grocery, Boars Head Black forest ham or smoked turkey, or maybe a few others. I try to keep it at the ideal temp in the ideal wrap or compartment, but I may eat it all in one go, or leave it more than a week. I know when the texture is wrong, or it has that rainbow coloring going on, but I am curious about any health risks that will keep me or my “loved ones” off our feet. What should I look for?
I won’t touch freshly sliced deli meats like smoked turkey or ham past the 4 day maybe 5 day mark. Although I have no problem with Genoa/hard salami or pepperoni at 10 days. Others will probably disagree. Call me paranoid, I don’t care.
Of course, I take the word paranoid to mean something fairly specific. Do you have a rationale for freshly sliced deli meats and five days?
I found this , but it doesn’t really explain it.
Maybe this.
Ready-to-eat Meat Products As a Source of Listeria Monocytogenes.
Or this!
Am I getting off topic.
5 days is what I feel comfortable with. I don’t pay attention to anything other than that.
Well, there’s that!
I’ve tried to buy deli sliced meats in small enough quantities to eat them rather quickly. But sometimes they just get forgotten. I never really look at the dates, they have to survive the smell and touch test.
Recently I found a package of sliced american cheese in the bottom drawer that I had forgotten about. It still seemed fine, but it was from December! So I tossed it!
For me, it was Karl Ehmer leberkase, made in-house. Every Saturday, my father and I would get to the shop as soon as it opened and buy a big slab of the stuff, still hot from the oven. Never had another quite as good.
From my youth in the 50s and 60s, I remember a favourite sandwich meat was polony - a fairly soft and quite bland sausage. Not seen it for many years. Another was brawn - that’s still around although not generally stocked by supermarkets. I’d need to go to an old-fashioned market hall in one of our nearby towns.
Bologna and head cheese in American.
(I just looked them up)
