Ham Paste

Ham paste is the mild one. On the British shelf of jarred meat and fish pastes, where the beef runs dark and the fish ones come on salty and pungent, this is the pale pink scrape a child will eat without complaint. It is cured cooked ham milled to a fine, smooth emulsion with butter or pork fat, lightly seasoned, and sealed into a small wide-necked jar. Where the meat in a ham sandwich is a slice you can lift and fold, here it is a soft pink film you drag across the bread with the back of a knife.

That mildness is built in, not accidental. A leaner, kinder cure keeps the colour pale and the salt low, and the fine milling erases every fibre of the meat, so what is left is faintly hammy and entirely without chew. The cost of that smoothness is structure: the paste brings no texture of its own to the sandwich, which is why it behaves as a spread and lives in the lunchbox and the picnic basket rather than at the deli counter.

So the whole craft sits in the spreading. A layer of soft butter goes down first, edge to edge, and the paste rides on top of it as a thin even film. The butter is doing real work here. It is the slick that lets the paste glide across a soft slice instead of catching and tearing the crumb into holes, and it carries a little of the dairy weight the meat cannot. Too thick and the paste claggs into a pale heavy smear; too thin and you are eating buttered bread with a memory of ham. Soft sliced white is the bread, plain and yielding, since a crusty loaf would simply overpower a filling with no firmness of its own to resist. Crusts come off as often as not.

Lift one at room temperature and the first thing to reach you is a soft, faintly smoky breath of cured pork, more suggestion than statement. Then the slice gives with no resistance at all, and the paste goes slack against the roof of your mouth and is gone almost before you have registered it, leaving the butter as the only thing with any body, a cool dairy film thinning out across the tongue. Nothing snaps, nothing needs chewing, and the whole mouthful is over in a beat. It is bland in the precise and intended sense, the quiet taste of a particular British childhood as much as of ham. A leaf of cucumber or a thin smear of pickle is the most anyone adds, and plenty add nothing.

It is a sandwich at its plainest and an honest one even so, a soft filling shut inside two slices. Press it flat and quarter it into triangles and you have the tea-plate version; pack it whole in greaseproof and you have the satchel version. A paste sandwich also keeps where a sliced-ham one fails: the spread works quietly into the crumb over a morning instead of weeping out of it, so the thing that survives a school bag is exactly the thing with no loose slice to dry at the edges. That keeping quality is not a side note. It is the reason the form exists.

It should not be confused with potted ham in the old kitchen sense, meat cooked and pounded and sealed under a cap of its own clarified fat to last for weeks. Jarred ham paste is that idea sent through a factory: the same preserved, spreadable meat, but milder, shelf-stable, and bought from a supermarket rather than potted at home. The paler chicken paste and the darker, stronger beef paste are its true siblings on the shelf, same jar and same thin scrape, each simply tasting of its own animal.

The Shippam's jar

This one has a named author, which most everyday sandwiches do not. Charles Shippam opened a grocer's shop at West Gate, Chichester, in 1786, selling butter, cheese and West Country meat. The family turned to pork butchery over the following century, and by the 1890s they were making the potted meats and pastes that would carry the name across the country. The form locked into place in 1906, when Shippam's first packed its pastes into small sterilised glass jars closed with an airtight metal cap. That wide-necked jar, made to take a knife and to keep in a cupboard, is the object most British households still picture at the words ham paste.

The jar went where its keeping let it go. Shippam's pastes supplied the Royal Family and the armed forces, and a stock travelled south with Captain Scott's 1910 Antarctic expedition, the meat earning its passage precisely because it needed no cold store. In 1913 the firm built its landmark factory along East Walls in Chichester, complete with a laboratory that policed every ingredient in and out, and it ran as the town's signature industry for most of the century that followed.

The brand outlasted both its family and its factory. Princes Limited took over Shippam's in 2001, and rather than ending Chichester production it moved it the following year to a new works on Terminus Road across town; the old East Walls building was demolished in 2005. Yet the paste never went away, still made under the Shippam's and Princes labels in the same wide-necked jar, and the old factory did not vanish whole. Its façade still stands at the corner of East Walls and East Street, and if you look up, the brand's wishbone symbol is hanging there yet, below the Shippam's clock.