Pork: Broiled
Broiled Ham and Eggs.
Slice the ham thin, take off the rind, and soak the slices in hot water.
Broil carefully and place on a hot platter. Break as many eggs as you require into a pan of boiling water; when the white is done, dip out carefully and lay the egg on ham. Sprinkle pepper and salt over each egg and serve.
Sausage Rolls. on Make a dough as for baking-powder biscuit; roll out and cut in large rounds with a biscuit cutter; lay sausage meat on half of each piece; turn the other half over and pinch together; bake half an hour. Serve with brown sauce poured around it.
Two quick pork breakfast dishes with no temperatures or quantities given, both of which assume the heavily salted, dry-cured ham and loose bulk sausage of a hundred years ago.
- Why the ham is soakedCountry ham of the period was dry-salt cured and genuinely too salty to eat straight. Soaking thin slices in hot water for a few minutes drew off the surface salt. Supermarket wet-cured ham needs none of this; skip the soak or the slices will turn watery and refuse to brown.
- "Broil" hereBroiling means direct high heat, which for thin ham slices is best done in a dry heavy skillet or under a very hot grill for one to two minutes a side. Sliced this thin the object is browning at the edges rather than long cooking.
- The eggs are poached, not boiled"A pan of boiling water" should be brought down to a bare simmer with barely a tremble on the surface before the eggs go in, or the whites shred. Three minutes gives a set white and a liquid yolk; lift out with a slotted spoon and drain against a cloth so water does not run onto the ham.
- Sausage roll doughA baking-powder biscuit dough of the era is roughly 2 cups flour, 4 teaspoons baking powder, half a teaspoon salt, 4 tablespoons fat and about three-quarters of a cup of milk. Roll it a good half-inch thick so the seam survives the folding and pinching.
- Oven and timeThe recipe gives no oven heat; a biscuit dough implies a hot oven, and the stated half hour should be long enough for both dough and filling. Check that the sausage centre has reached 160F, since raw bulk pork sealed inside dough heats more slowly than a loose patty.
- Sealing the roundsPinch the edges firmly and press with a fork. Sausage meat throws off a good deal of fat as it cooks, and any gap will let it run out and fry the underside of the pastry.
- Brown sauceThis means a plain flour-and-drippings gravy or a light espagnole, not a bottled brown sauce. Pan drippings from the sausage rolls, whisked with a spoonful of flour and thinned with stock, is closest to what was intended.
- YieldThe recipe says only "large rounds"; a dough of that size will cut into roughly eight, enough for about four people. The ham and eggs is written to scale with the number of people at table.
Ham with a poached or fried egg is a long-standing pairing in English and American cooking. The instruction to soak the ham is the tell: before mechanical refrigeration was general, pork was preserved with enough salt to keep through the warm months, and drawing that salt back out with hot water was a routine preliminary rather than a refinement. The sausage roll here is a biscuit-dough treatment of the same idea as the British pastry-wrapped sausage, and using a chemically leavened quick dough instead of short pastry is characteristic of a period in which baking powder had made such doughs easy to throw together.