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Ham, with Savoury Crust
Instead of strewing plain browned bread-crumbs over the ham when the skin is taken off, a pleasing variety may be made by seasoning them with a table-spoonful of sugar and five or six powdered cloves. Put the ham in a baking-dish, brush it over with beaten egg, and strew the seasoned crumbs thickly upon it. Place it in a hot oven or before the fire for a few minutes to brown.
This is a finishing step rather than a whole dish: it assumes a ham already boiled or baked, lifted from the pot, and stripped of its skin while still hot. The crumb coating goes on at the very end.
- The hinge: coat the ham hotThe hinge: coat the ham while still warm -- Common practice was to skin and crumb a ham while it was still warm from boiling, so the egg grips the fat readily; the recipe itself does not specify, and the coating is in any case set by the browning in the oven or before the fire.
- "Browned bread-crumbs"These are raspings — dry crumbs from stale bread, toasted in a low oven until sandy and pale brown, not the soft fresh crumbs sold today. Panko will not behave the same way; dried plain crumbs toasted dry in a pan are the closest match.
- QuantitiesThe recipe fixes only the seasoning: a tablespoonful of sugar and five or six powdered cloves, worked evenly through the crumbs. It gives no crumb quantity or ham size; a cup and a half of dry crumbs and one beaten egg will coat a medium ham, but that is an estimate, not the book's.
- Five or six cloves is a lotFive or six cloves -- Whole cloves ground fresh in a spice mill are considerably stronger than old ground clove from a jar, so the five or six of the original may go further than expected; the recipe gives no crumb quantity against which to judge the proportion.
- "A hot oven"The book gives no temperatures; 'hot' is conventionally read today as somewhere in the 425-450F range. The sugar in the crumbs browns fast, and the recipe asks only for 'a few minutes' -- watch it rather than time it.
- "Before the fire"The Victorian alternative was to stand the ham on its dish in front of an open range and let radiant heat colour the crust. A broiler at moderate distance does the same job, but it colours in two or three minutes and needs turning.
- ServingThe recipe stops at browning and says nothing about carving. A short rest before slicing will let the crust firm; cut in thin slices with a long, flexible knife.
Coating a boiled ham with raspings was standard practice in nineteenth-century English kitchens, and for a plain reason: once the skin is peeled away the fat beneath is greyish and unappetising, and a crumb coating gives it a clean, even surface for the table. Cassell's here proposes dressing up that utilitarian habit with sugar and clove — the same pairing that flavours the more familiar glazed and clove-studded ham, redistributed into the crust instead. Clove and cured pork have been linked in English cookery since at least the spice-heavy medieval kitchen, and the combination survived into the Victorian period. It is a method to be applied at will rather than a dish in itself: the reader is expected to already own a cooked ham and simply want it to look better.