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Ham Toast (Chop very fine two spoonfuls)
Chop very fine two spoonfuls of lean ham that has been cooked; take two spoonfuls veal gravy; a few bread crumbs.
Put all together in a stewpan and heat it. Have ready a toast buttered, spread the above upon it, strew a few bread crumbs over it and brown it before the fire.--Mrs. S.
A savoury from the era when leftover ham and a jar of stock could be turned into a single plate of something hot. The whole thing takes under ten minutes once you have the gravy.
- "Two spoonfuls"Neither teaspoon nor tablespoon is specified here. Read it as tablespoons: roughly 2 tablespoons chopped ham to 2 tablespoons gravy, which covers one large slice of toast. Scale up in that ratio.
- Veal gravyThis means the pan juices or reduced stock from a roast of veal. Veal stock is the closest substitute; a good unsalted chicken stock reduced by half will do. Avoid anything heavily salted, since the ham brings plenty.
- "Brown it before the fire"An open-hearth instruction: the toast was set close to the coals, on a fork, a trivet, or under a salamander. Use a broiler on high, rack in the upper third, for one to two minutes until the crumbs colour. Watch it: buttered toast under a broiler goes from gold to black quickly.
- The hinge: keep it thickThe mixture should be a moist paste that mounds on the toast, not a sauce. If the gravy is thin, let it reduce in the stewpan and add crumbs until it holds together, or the toast collapses before it reaches the table.
- Bread crumbs, two jobsThe crumbs stirred into the pan bind; the crumbs strewn on top brown. Use soft fresh crumbs inside and drier, coarser ones on top for a better crust.
- Toast it dry firstToast well and butter while hot, so the surface seals. Soft bread lightly warmed will turn to pulp under the wet ham.
- SeasoningNone is given; the cured ham and the roast gravy would presumably have carried it. Taste before spreading; black pepper, a scrape of nutmeg or a spoonful of cream are all period-appropriate additions.
- Yield and servingOne slice per person, as a breakfast dish, a light supper, or the savoury course at the end of a dinner. Serve immediately.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (usually dated to the late 1870s, with printings variously given as 1877, 1878 and 1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by some 250 Virginia housekeepers, is full of these small signed receipts — "Mrs. S." is one of scores of such attributions, and the book's value lies in its being a collective record rather than one cook's manual. Ham toast belongs to the long English tradition of the savoury on toast, alongside potted meats and Scotch woodcock, and it exists because nothing in a household of this kind was thrown away: the tag ends of a cured ham and the gravy left in the veal roasting pan were both too good to waste and too little to serve alone. Virginia ham, dry-cured and long-hung, was the region's proudest product, and recipes for using its remnants run all through the book. The direction to brown a dish "before the fire" rather than in an oven marks the recipe as older than the cookstove, or at least written by someone who had cooked at a hearth.