Old Recipe For Amish Ham Salad

Published:Mar 21, 2025 · Updated:Mar 21, 2025 by Kevin Williams |1 Comment

This is an old, old Amish recipe for homemade ham salad from an Amish woman in Indiana. A lot of Amish recipes for ham salad, believe it or not, are "mock ham salad" recipes using ground-up hot dogs. This is an old recipe that actually uses ham. Sounds like a simple version of this all-American picnic classic, so save this for the upcoming spring and summer picnic season!

✅ How to Make An Amish Ham Salad

Well, first, you don't need hot dogs. Many Amish cooks do use ground up hot dogs in place of ham, which I find puzzling because wouldn't it just be called "hot dog salad?" No, this recipe actually an Amish ham salad.

Reader Barbara tested out this recipe for us and here is what she had to say:

I made this today and my husband really liked it. However, I only used 3 eggs and used celery flakes because I did not have fresh celery. This was a very simple version of ham salad. It is good on crackers as a snack and will be equally tasty on a sandwich!

I do agree with the assessment that this is very good on crackers. I ate it as a sandwich and it was good that way too. You can adjust the proportions in this recipe to your taste. For instance, this recipe does call for six eggs. With the price of eggs today, that is expensive and, well, to me that just makes that salad more like "egg salad with some ham." If I wanted egg salad, I'd fix egg salad. So we cut it down to four eggs, but if I had to do it over I might well cut it to three. Still, if you like ham and egg salad, then keep it at six.

📋 Step-by-Step Amish Ham Salad

Above is a photo of the actual handwritten copy of the recipe. I love seeing old, handwritten recipes.

Gathering the ham salad recipe ingredients....Very simple, basic ingredients, which makes it appealing to Amish cooks some of who might grow their own celery and have their own freshly butchered ham on hand.

Find a large bowl and put all the ingredients in. We just put the ham through a chopper. You don't have to grind the ham, you can chop it fine and they recipe will work.

After you combine it, you get this delicious ham-egg mixture. Again, you can adjust the eggs to your taste. I think probably many Amish cooks historically had a lot of eggs on hand so it was a cheap way to stretch out the ham, but adding more eggs to the ham salad.