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Ham Fritters
Take the bone of a ham from which no more slices can be cut, and pick off every part of the lean meat, and the same quantity of fat. Mince it finely, and with one pound of mince mix two eggs, a cupful of finely-grated bread-crumbs, and half a tea-spoonful of white pepper. Make a thin custard with two eggs and a quarter of a pint of milk. Cut a roll of bread into neat little rounds, and put them into the custard to soak. Take them up with a slicer, and put them into a frying-pan, with some hot butter. When they are lightly browned, take them out, spread the mixture thickly over them, strew some grated crumbs over the top, and fry them three or four minutes in butter. Probable cost, 8d. for this quantity, exclusive of the meat. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A Victorian economy dish that turns the last scrapings of a ham bone into something worth serving. The instructions are sound; only the units and a few assumptions need translating.
- The hinge: keep the mince dry enough to stay putOne pound of finely minced lean and fat bound with two eggs and a cup of crumbs should hold together in a thick paste, not a batter. If it slumps off the fried bread round, add crumbs a spoonful at a time until it will stand up on the spoon.
- Quantities in modern termsA quarter of a pint is 5 fl oz (150 ml) in imperial measure, not the US 4 oz. "A cupful" of crumbs is unstandardised here; treat it as roughly 2 oz / 55 g of fine dry crumbs and adjust by feel.
- Two eggs, two jobsThe recipe uses four eggs in total: two bind the mince, two more make the soaking custard with the milk. Do not combine them.
- How much hamA picked ham bone rarely yields a pound of lean plus an equal weight of fat. Make up the difference with any cooked ham or gammon offcuts; the fat matters, since all-lean mince fries dry.
- No saltThere is no salt in the ingredient list; cured ham brings plenty of its own. Season the finished fritters at the table if at all.
- The bread roundsCut the roll about half an inch thick and soak only briefly, a few seconds a side. Bread left in custard until saturated collapses when it hits the pan. "A slicer" is a fish slice or offset spatula.
- FryingButter alone will brown and burn at the heat needed for three or four minutes of frying. Use clarified butter, or butter with a little neutral oil, over medium heat. Fry mince side down first so the egg binder sets before you turn them.
- DonenessThe ham is already cooked, so what you are cooking through is the raw egg in the mixture. If the crust colours before the centre is firm, transfer the fritters to a 350F oven for five minutes rather than pushing the heat.
- YieldAs stated, three or four servings, which suits a supper or breakfast dish with mustard and a sharp salad rather than a main course.
Cassell's belongs to the great age of British household economy writing, when a middle-class kitchen was judged partly on how little it threw away, and this recipe is a pure specimen of the type: it begins not with an ingredient but with a bone "from which no more slices can be cut". Ham, brined and often smoked, was one of the few meats a household could keep for weeks, and the last picked shreds were, by all accounts, commonly worked into potted meat, croquettes, omelettes or fritters like these. The word fritter comes through Old French from Latin frigere, to fry, and in nineteenth-century English it covered a much wider field than batter-dipped fruit: anything savoury bound, shaped and fried in shallow fat could claim the name. The habit of quoting a "probable cost" - here eightpence, pointedly excluding the meat, which was reckoned already paid for - was a Cassell's trademark, and it suggests the book was written for cooks answerable to a mistress with an account book.