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Cold Boiled Ham
To use up bits of cold boiled ham, reject most of the fat, and to a coffee cupful of chopped ham very fine, add the yolks of four eggs, a cup of milk with one tablespoon flour, stir smoothly in it a little pepper, then add the whites of the eggs beaten stiff. Drop in the frying pan in one half lard and one-half butter sufficient to fry; when cooked enough to turn do so, being careful not to brown them too much. An onion may be chopped with the meat if the flavor is liked.
These are ham fritters in all but name — a thin egg batter bound with a spoonful of flour, lightened with beaten whites, and cooked like small pancakes. The batter is loose, so the handling matters more than the ingredients.
- The hinge: fold, then cook at onceThe whites are the only leavening here. Fold them in with a light hand and get the mixture into the pan immediately; if it stands, it slackens and the fritters cook flat and dense.
- Coffee cupfulPeriod cup measures were not standardised; a coffee cup is usually reckoned somewhere between about 3/4 cup and a full cup. Either way the milk and yolks together make up rather more liquid than there is chopped ham.
- One tablespoon flour is deliberateThis is a very thin binding, closer to a savoury custard than a batter. Expect the spoonfuls to spread; keep them small, about 2 tablespoons each, and do not crowd the pan.
- The frying fatHalf lard, half butter is what the recipe calls for; lard tolerates the heat and butter supplies flavour. Half butter, half a neutral high-heat oil behaves much the same way. Depth of about 1/8 inch is enough.
- Heat and colour"Not too much" browning means medium heat, not high. The ham is already cooked and salty, and the milk-and-egg base scorches quickly — you want pale gold, three to four minutes total, turning once when the edges set.
- Season at the end, if at allOnly pepper is called for, and boiled ham brings plenty of salt. Taste one fritter before adjusting.
- The onionIf you use it, chop it very fine or soften it in a little butter first. Raw onion in a fritter this thin will still be crunchy when the egg is done.
- YieldSomewhere between twelve and eighteen small fritters depending on how large you drop them, enough for three or four at supper. Good with mustard, a sharp pickle, or stewed tomatoes.
This is a leftovers recipe, and it says so in its first six words. A boiled ham was a standing fixture of the late nineteenth-century larder — cooked whole, carved cold for days, and finally reduced to "bits" that were too good to discard and too ragged to serve sliced. Books of this era are full of such second and third uses: hashes, croquettes, scallops, and fritters of exactly this kind, where finely chopped meat is stretched with eggs and milk into something that eats like a fresh dish. A cook working from this book would have read the recipe less as a dish to plan than as a use to keep in mind.