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Fried Ham and Eggs
If the ham is very salt, pour cold water on it and boil at once; turn water off, put ham in and fry quickly, when done place it on a platter, pour on ham whatever remains in the skillet, rinse all the salt out of the skillet and put in fresh lard, when hot, drop carefully from a saucer, a few eggs at a time. When done garnish the ham by placing the eggs around the ham.
This is written for dry-cured country ham cut thin and cooked in a heavy skillet. The whole method turns on one thing: getting rid of excess salt before the ham hits the fat, then keeping that salt out of the eggs.
- The blanching step"Pour cold water on it and boil at once; turn water off" means cover the slices with cold water, bring it just to a boil, then drain the water away. It is a quick de-salting rinse, not a poach, and it applies only to ham that is genuinely salty. Modern supermarket "city" ham is wet-cured and mild; skip the water entirely.
- What kind of ham this assumesA slice off a whole dry-cured country ham. The recipe gives no thickness; slices of this kind are usually cut somewhere between a quarter and a half inch. That style is still sold in the American South and by mail order. Center-cut slices of any thick-cut cured ham stand in reasonably well.
- Fry quicklyCured ham is already preserved and needs only browning and heating through, two to three minutes a side over medium-high heat. Long cooking drives out moisture and turns the lean into leather.
- "Whatever remains in the skillet"The fat and browned drippings poured over the ham are the point of the dish, not a tidying step. A tablespoon of coffee or water swirled into that skillet before pouring is the same gesture that produces red-eye gravy.
- Why the skillet is rinsedSalt left in the pan from a country ham, along with any sugar in the cure, will season the eggs past eating and can scorch in the fresh fat. Wipe or rinse the pan and dry it before the eggs go in.
- Fresh lardLard is still sold and behaves best here, but butter or a neutral oil work. Two tablespoons is enough for a few eggs; medium heat gives set whites with soft yolks, higher heat gives crisp lacy edges.
- Dropping from a saucerCracking each egg into a saucer first lets you slide it into the fat without breaking the yolk and lets you catch a bad egg before it joins the pan. It remains a reliable way to fry eggs neatly.
- YieldNo quantities are given. Figure one ham slice and two eggs per person, and cook the eggs in batches of three or four so the pan temperature does not drop.
Fried ham and eggs sits at the front of many American breakfast chapters because it drew on the two things a household with a smokehouse and a henhouse always had. Hams were dry-cured with salt in the autumn, hung through the winter, and cut into slices as needed, which is why a recipe like this opens with the problem of salt rather than with the pan: the cure was calibrated for keeping, not for eating straight. The instruction to pour the skillet drippings over the meat is often connected with red-eye gravy, generally traced to the ham-curing regions of the upland South, where a splash of black coffee was added to the pan for the same purpose. The recipe assumes knowledge the writer never had to spell out, from what "very salt" feels like to how thick a slice should be, which is a good measure of how routine the dish was.