Home › The Principles of Cookery › Ham, Fried
Ham, Fried
Melt a little bacon fat or dripping in a fryingpan; put in the slices of ham, and fry them very gently until done enough. Turn them six or eight times during the process, or they will be hard.
Four lines of instruction, and all the technique is in the last one. This assumes a cut slice from a whole cured ham, not the thin pre-cooked deli ham of today.
- What the ham isA Victorian ham was typically dry-cured and often heavily salted, and a slice would have been cut from the joint rather than bought ready-sliced; the recipe gives no thickness. A modern equivalent is a thick-cut gammon or country ham steak; if you are using wet-cured supermarket ham steaks, they are already mild and cook in a fraction of the time.
- Very salty hamTraditional dry-cured ham may need soaking in cold water for an hour or two, or a brief blanch, before frying. Cassell's assumes the cook already knows the ham in her larder; a country ham bought today will tell you on the label.
- The fatOnly enough to keep the slice from sticking. Ham renders its own fat quickly, and a cast-iron or heavy steel pan needs little more than a smear. Dripping is beef or pork fat saved from roasting; butter, lard or a neutral oil all work.
- Gently means gentlyThis is the hinge of the recipe. Ham is lean and salt-firmed, and high heat drives out moisture and leaves it leathery. Medium-low, no browning haste.
- Turning six or eight timesFrequent turning keeps both faces at an even, moderate temperature rather than letting one side overheat while the other cools, and it cooks the slice through with less shrinkage.
- Timing"Until done enough" will be a matter of minutes over gentle heat, less for thin or pre-cooked ham. The ham is ready when it is firm and opaque throughout, before the edges begin to curl and harden.
- Snip the fat edgeCut through the rind and fat band in two or three places before it goes in the pan, or the slice will buckle as the fat contracts.
- Yield and what followsOne good slice per person. The pan leavings are the point of the exercise: eggs fried in them, or a spoonful of water or cider swirled in off the heat to make a thin gravy for the plate.
Fried ham belongs to the plain breakfast cookery that a Victorian household ran on, where a home-cured or grocer-bought ham hung in the larder and was sliced from as needed over weeks. The whole logic of curing was preservation before refrigeration, and the salt content that made that possible is exactly what makes the instruction "fry them very gently" necessary — salted, low-fat muscle stiffens and dries the moment it is pushed hard. The pairing with eggs is old and international, and the discipline of turning repeatedly may well have owed something to the uneven heat of the open coal range, though the connection is a matter of inference rather than record; a cook who left a slice to sit got a scorched face and a raw middle.