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Frizzled Ham and Eggs
Take bits of either boiled or fried ham, chop fine, and place in skillet prepared with butter or beef drippings; take four to six wellbeaten eggs, pour over ham, and when heated through, season well with pepper and salt; stir together, cook until done brown, and turn over without stirring.
A scrap dish for leftover ham, closer to a flat omelette than to scrambled eggs. The instructions are terse in the usual Buckeye way; a few points fill the gaps.
- What "frizzled" meansFrizzling is frying thin bits of cured meat until the edges curl and crisp in their own fat. The ham should be in the pan long enough to take colour before the eggs go in, not merely warmed.
- Skillet and heatA well-seasoned cast-iron or nonstick pan of 8 to 10 inches suits four to six eggs. Medium heat: high enough to set the base, low enough that the underside does not blacken while the middle is still liquid.
- Beef drippingsRendered beef fat was a standard frying medium in 1877 kitchens and gives a savoury edge. Butter works, but if the ham is fatty you may need no added fat at all beyond a smear to stop sticking.
- "Turn over without stirring"This is the hinge. Once the eggs are set enough to hold together, the cake is flipped whole and browned on the second side, like a frittata. Stirring at that point would turn it into scrambled eggs and defeat the dish.
- Season after, not beforeThe recipe adds salt and pepper once the eggs are heated through rather than at the start. Cured ham varies wildly in saltiness, so taste the ham first and salt with a light hand.
- Doneness"Cook until done brown" means the exterior; the interior should be just set and still moist. Modern practice is to cook eggs until firm rather than runny.
- YieldThe recipe fixes only the eggs, four to six, and gives no quantity for the ham. That will serve two to three at breakfast, or four cut into wedges alongside toast and fried potatoes.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (1877) was compiled from contributions by Ohio housewives, and this entry shows the compilers' habitual thrift: it begins with "bits" of ham already cooked, the remains of an earlier meal, and turns them into a second dish rather than letting them go to waste. Home-cured hams were a fixture of Midwestern farm households, salted and smoked in quantity after autumn butchering and drawn on all year, so odds and ends of ham were a constant presence in the larder. The word "frizzle" for frying meat until it curls and sputters is older than the book and was common in nineteenth-century American cookery writing, most familiarly in frizzled dried beef. The technique here of setting a flat egg cake and flipping it whole belongs to the same broad family as the Spanish tortilla and the Italian frittata, though the book makes no such connection.