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Ham, Burgundy, Mode of Preparing
Soak and boil a ham as usual, but a trifle under the time generally allowed. Take it up, drain it, take off the skin, and trim it neatly. Put it into a deep baking-dish, the fat side uppermost, and pour over it some boiling sauce, made of a pint of good stock, three ounces of sugar, and a bottle of wine (Madeira is the kind generally preferred). Put the dish in a hot oven, until the gravy is considerably reduced, and the ham glazed to a bright brown colour. Send good brown sauce and onion sauce to table with it. Time to boil, twenty minutes to the pound; to bake, about half an hour. Probable cost of ham, 1s. per pound.
A whole boiled ham finished in the oven under a sweet fortified-wine glaze. The method still works, but almost every number in it assumes a dry-cured, heavily salted raw ham rather than the pre-cooked joints sold today.
- What matters mostThe ham is deliberately pulled from the pot underdone so the oven can finish it while the wine reduces. If you boil it to full doneness first, the glazing stage will overcook it and the meat will be dry and stringy.
- Which hamThe recipe assumes a raw, dry-salt-cured ham that genuinely needs soaking — 12 to 24 hours in cold water, changed once or twice. A modern brined, pre-cooked supermarket ham needs no soaking and only gentle reheating, so the boiling time here does not apply to it.
- Boiling time and temperatureTwenty minutes to the pound is generous but not far off for a large raw cured leg; judge by an internal temperature of about 150F (65C) at the thickest point before you take it up, allowing the oven stage to carry it a little further. Keep the water at a bare simmer rather than a rolling boil, which shrinks and toughens the outer meat.
- "A hot oven"Victorian books give no temperatures; the term is conventionally read as roughly 425-450F (220-230C). Three ounces of sugar plus a whole bottle of wine will scorch quickly at that heat: 400F (200C) with basting every ten minutes gives a more reliable bright brown glaze.
- The sauce quantitiesA pint here is the imperial pint, 20 fl oz (about 570 ml); a modern bottle of wine is 750 ml. Three ounces of sugar is 85 g. Madeira is named only as the wine "generally preferred", and any decent medium-dry fortified wine behaves much the same way in a reduction.
- Skin and fatPeel the skin off while the ham is still hot — it comes away cleanly then and fights you once cold. Scoring the exposed fat in a diamond pattern before glazing helps the glaze catch, though the recipe does not mention it.
- The accompanying sauces"Good brown sauce" is a reduced meat-stock sauce (espagnole or a simple demi-glace), and onion sauce is a béchamel with softened onion. Both are separate undertakings, and neither is essential if you spoon the reduced pan glaze over the carved slices instead.
- Yield and servingA ham of 10-12 lb will serve twenty or more, and is best carved thin. Rest it 20 to 30 minutes after the oven before slicing.
- On the priceOne shilling per pound is a Victorian retail figure and tells you only that ham was a substantial but not extravagant purchase in a household that could afford a whole leg and a bottle of Madeira to pour over it.
Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery was a late-Victorian household encyclopaedia, arranged alphabetically and aimed at cooks working with a coal range and a well-stocked larder, which is why entries like this one give a price per pound as a matter of course. The name is a small puzzle: "Burgundy ham" would suggest a red Burgundy in the sauce, yet the recipe recommends Madeira. British cookery books of the period used regional labels loosely, often as a signal of style rather than provenance, and Madeira was widely used for glazing in English kitchens, keeping well once opened and reducing to a deep sweetness that red table wine does not. The two-stage method itself — boil the salt out, then finish in the oven with sugar and wine — is often seen as a forerunner of the glazed baked ham still served at Christmas and Easter.