Home › The Principles of Cookery › Ham Sauce for Flavouring Gravies, Etc
Ham Sauce for Flavouring Gravies, Etc
Take the bone of a ham, from which no more slices can be cut. Pick off all the meat, and chop the bone into five or six pieces. Put it in a saucepan with half a pint of good unflavoured stock. Simmer gently for half an hour, stirring occasionally to prevent it burning. Add a bunch of sweet herbs, six peppercorns, and another half-pint of stock, cover the saucepan closely, and simmer again very gently for two hours. Strain, and put aside for use. This sauce will be found very useful in flavouring gravies, sauces, etc. (see GRAVY, TO IMPROVE THE COLOUR AND FLAVOUR OF). Probable cost, 3d. per half-pint, exclusive of the ham-bone.
This is a ham-bone essence rather than a sauce in the modern sense: a concentrated salty stock kept on hand to lift gravies. It keeps well and freezes better still.
- The hinge: no salt, everA ham bone releases a great deal of cure into the liquid, and two hours of reduction concentrates it further. The stock you start with must be unsalted, and anything you later flavour with this needs seasoning adjusted at the end.
- QuantitiesHalf a pint in a Victorian British book is 10 fl oz, so the two additions come to about 2 1/2 cups total. Expect roughly a cup of finished essence after two and a half hours of gentle simmering and straining.
- "Good unflavoured stock"A plain light stock with no salt, no wine and no strong aromatics — veal or chicken bones simmered with nothing but water. Commercial cartons are almost always salted and often already herbed, which defeats the purpose.
- Chopping the boneA ham hock or shank bone will not yield to a kitchen knife. Ask the butcher to saw it into pieces, or simply use it whole in a taller, narrower pan so the liquid covers it.
- Bunch of sweet herbsThe period term for a bunch of aromatic herbs tied together, most often parsley and thyme with a bay leaf; marjoram and savory also fell under the heading.
- Skim and chillHam fat renders freely. Strain, chill overnight, and lift the solid cap off before use, or the essence will make gravies greasy rather than savoury.
- KeepingSalt and reduction give it some staying power, but treat it as any stock: about four days refrigerated. Frozen in an ice-cube tray it gives you small measured doses, a tablespoon or two at a time.
The entry is infrastructure: a stock-room preparation kept in the larder to be spooned into other dishes, in the same family as glaze, meat essence and browning. A whole ham was a substantial household investment, carved down over weeks until only the shank end and bone remained, and Victorian kitchen economy held that the bone still carried value worth two hours of a low fire. The cross-reference to "Gravy, to Improve the Colour and Flavour of" shows the intended use — a spoonful to give depth to a thin pan gravy, at a time when commercial meat extracts were arguably sold on much the same promise. The technique survives in the ham hock that flavours a pot of beans or split-pea soup, though few cooks now bother to draw the flavour off separately and bottle it.