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Delicious Fried Ham
Place the slices in boiling water and cook till tender; put in frying-pan and brown, and dish on a platter; fry some eggs by dripping gravy over them until done, instead of turning; take up carefully and lay them on the slices of ham. - Mrs. J. F. Woods, Milford Center.
A two-part method: parboil the ham to draw out salt and soften it, then brown it and baste eggs in the rendered fat. Both steps assume a dry-cured country ham, not the wet-cured supermarket product.
- Know which ham you haveThis recipe assumes the hard, salty, dry-cured ham of an 1870s farm household, cut in slices (the recipe gives no thickness). Modern wet-cured or "city" ham is already mild, moist and fully cooked, and boiling it will only wash out flavor and leave it stringy. If you are using ordinary deli-style or spiral-cut ham, skip straight to browning.
- Why boil firstThe boiling water pulls salt out of a country ham and relaxes the muscle fibers. The recipe simply says to cook till tender; for a thick slice ten to twenty minutes at a bare simmer is usually enough, but taste a corner before you decide it is done. Discard the water, it will be very salty.
- Dry before browningBlot the slices well after they come out of the water. Wet ham steams in the pan instead of browning, and the browning is where the fat for the eggs comes from.
- "Dripping gravy over them"This is basting, not gravy in the thickened sense. Tip the pan so the hot ham fat pools at one edge and spoon it over the whites until they set, which keeps the yolk soft and the surface unbroken. Two to three minutes over moderate heat is typical; if the fat is smoking the whites will blister before the tops set.
- Fat in the panA lean modern ham steak will not render enough fat to baste with. Add a tablespoon or two of butter or bacon fat to the pan before the eggs go in.
- Egg donenessBasted eggs done this way have a runny yolk. For anyone who should avoid undercooked egg, cook until the yolk is firm, which takes another minute or so under the hot fat.
- YieldOne slice of ham and one or two eggs per person; the recipe scales as far as your pan does, but brown the ham in batches rather than crowding.
Buckeye Cookery (1877) came out of Ohio at a time when a great many households still put up their own pork, and the ham in question would have been salt-cured and smoked in a farm smokehouse, then hung for months. Salt that heavy needed managing at the stove, which is why so many nineteenth-century American ham recipes open with soaking or parboiling before any pan ever gets hot. The book's contributions are credited by name and town, as here to Mrs. J. F. Woods of Milford Center, a practice that made these community compilations part cookbook and part local register. Basting eggs in the ham fat rather than flipping them is a thrift habit as much as a technique: the fat is already in the pan, and an unturned yolk stays whole for the plate.