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Pork and Ham Left-Overs
COLD pork, in the estimation of some persons, is better than when it is hot. Serve it in neatly cut slices for tea or luncheon at the second meal, then take stock of the remains and look to the future. Roast-pork bones make an excellent brown stock, almost as rich as that of roast beef.
Trim the scraps from the bones and consign them to the soup kettle. Cut with a keen knife all the fat from the meat that is not to be served cold.
This fat rendered down makes an excellent dripping to sauté potatoes. Chop, and allow it to melt, strain, and set away in the refrigerator. The tender white meat of pork makes a salad which tastes very much like chicken. Sometimes if one has a few bits of chicken left over, they may be combined with the pork, cut in neat cubes, and the fraud can scarcely be detected. Pork makes excellent croquettes or is good sliced and reheated in a cup of its brown gravy. It may be minced, enriched by a few spoonfuls of gravy, and poured on toast for a breakfast dish. Cold ham has a multitude of uses. A few scraps may be converted into a delicious sandwich or gives an excellent flavor to a salad omelet or egg dish. Even cold sausage has its uses, while a slice or two of cold broiled bacon put through a meat chopper and added to croquette mixtures provides an agreeable seasoning.
Ham Soufflé.
Take 2 cupfuls cold minced ham, add the white of 1 egg and beat till smooth. Then put in a dash of paprika, 1 cupful whipped cream, and 2 whites of eggs beaten stiff. Pour into an oiled melon mold, bake, and serve with tomato sauce poured around it.
Ham Griddlecakes. 1 cupful minced ham, 2 cupfuls stale bread crumbs, 2 eggs, Pepper, 1 cupful scalded milk.
Mix the ham and crumbs with the milk and well-beaten eggs. Drop by spoonfuls on a hot buttered griddle.
Ham Balls.
Mince remains of lean ham, and mix with an equal quantity of mashed potatoes. Mold into small, flat cakes, roll in flour, and brown in a spider with slices of salt pork fried out.
Ham Toast. 2 cupfuls cold ham, 2 eggs, cupful cream, teaspoonful mustard, Pepper.
Chop very fine the cold ham, add the well-beaten eggs, cream, a little pepper and mustard. Heat this mixture till almost at the boiling point, and spread on slices of buttered toast.
Shredded Ham. tablespoonful butter, 5 tablespoonfuls currant jelly, Dash cayenne, 1 cupful cold ham.
Cut the ham into narrow strips.
Put the butter and currant jelly in a saucepan. As soon as they are melted, MRS. CURTIS'S COOKBOOK add the cayenne and ham, and sim- Block Island Croquettes. mer five minutes.
Ham Sandwiches. 2 cupfuls finely chopped ham, 1 cucumber pickle, 2 teaspoonfuls made mustard, 2 tablespoonfuls butter, ½ teaspoonful pepper.
Put the ham through a meat chopper, using the finest knife. Mix perfectly smooth with the butter and seasonings and spread between slices of bread from which the crusts have been cut.
Ham-and-Potato Pie. 1 cupful cream sauce, 2 cupfuls cold potatoes, 1½ cupfuls cold chopped ham, cupful dried bread crumbs.
Chop the ham coarsely and cut the potatoes into dice. Butter a vegetable dish, put in a layer of cold potato, then a layer of ham, and pour over it cupful cream sauce. Cover with another layer of potato and ham. Pour in the remainder of the sauce, and cover with buttered crumbs. Bake twenty minutes. 1 cupful minced ham, 1 cupful stale bread crumbs, 2 cupfuls chopped cold potatoes, 1 tablespoonful butter, 1 egg.
Mix the ham, crumbs, and potatoes with the butter and egg, make into small balls, flour, egg, crumb, and fry in hot fat.
Pork Cutlets. 2 cupfuls chopped cold pork, 2 eggs, cupful cracker crumbs, 1 teaspoonful minced parsley, 1 teaspoonful minced onion, 1 tablespoonful cream, Pepper and salt.
Beat the eggs thoroughly, mix with the cream, stir in the chopped pork, cracker crumbs, onion, parsley, and seasoning. Form into cutlet-shaped croquettes, roll in flour, egg, and crumbs. At the small end of the croquette stick in a few inches of macaroni. Fry in deep fat, and serve with tomato sauce,
A cluster of short recipes for using up a roast or a boiled ham, written for a kitchen where the joint was expected to feed the household for three or four days. Most need only a temperature and a time supplied.
- Salt first, season lastCured ham carries all the salt these dishes need. Taste before adding any, particularly in the ham toast, the ham balls and the sandwich filling, all of which also get salt pork, butter or mustard.
- Oven for the souffl eboth the ham soutingBake the ham souffl and the ham-and-potato pie at 350F. The souffl in a melon mold is best set in a pan of hot water and given 30 to 40 minutes until just firm; the pie, already made of cooked food, needs only the twenty minutes stated to heat through and brown the crumbs.
- A spider is a frying panOriginally a cast-iron skillet on legs that stood in the coals; any heavy skillet does. "Fried out" means rendering the salt pork slices until the fat runs and the scraps are crisp, then browning the ham balls in that fat.
- Ham toast will curdleEggs, cream and chopped ham brought "almost at the boiling point" is a custard by another name. Cook it over low heat or a water bath, stirring, and pull it off while it still flows; it thickens after it leaves the heat.
- Deep frying temperatureFor the croquettes and pork cutlets, hot fat means 365 to 375F. Chill the shaped pieces for half an hour after breading so they hold together, and fry only a few at a time so the fat does not drop below 350F.
- The macaroni trickA short length of uncooked macaroni pushed into the narrow end of a croquette imitates the protruding bone of a real cutlet. It is decoration only, and should be removed before eating.
- Missing quantitiesSeveral of the ingredient lists have lost their fractions, and read simply "cupful cream" or "tablespoonful butter." In the shredded ham, 1 tablespoon butter to 5 of currant jelly gives a workable glaze for a cup of ham; elsewhere, judge by consistency rather than guessing at the printed figures.
- Whipped cream in the souffl The 1 cupful of whipped cream should be whipped to soft peaks and folded in with the beaten whites, not beaten into the ham. Anything stiffer will not fold without knocking the air out.
- YieldSeveral of these call for two cupfuls of cooked meat, which will give roughly four modest servings or two generous ones; others (the griddlecakes, shredded ham and Block Island croquettes) start from a single cupful, and the ham balls give no quantity at all.
Books of this period devoted whole chapters to what was called the "second meal," because a household that roasted a large piece of meat had no way of freezing what it did not eat. The frank instruction here that pork salad tastes like chicken and "the fraud can scarcely be detected" is a period habit of mind: economy was a housekeeper's public virtue, but visible economy at table was not, so the leftover was disguised as croquettes, cutlets with fake bones, molded souffl s and sandwich pastes. The spider and the melon mold both suggest the era of the coal range and the elaborately shaped mold, and the currant jelly in the shredded ham reflects what is often said to be an English and American pairing of sweet red preserves with salted pork.