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Ham En Casserole
1 slice ham cut thick I small, chopped onion I bay leaf I blade mace 4 cloves ½ teaspoonful celery seed I small, sweet green pepper Salt and pepper Cider Brown the ham on both sides in a hot frying-pan, then lay it in a casserole, add the seasonings, the pepper and the onion chopped. Pour over enough sweet cider to come well up on to the ham.
Cover and bake slowly for two and a half or three hours. Serve hot with cider or tomato sauce and stuffed potatoes.
A braise of a single thick ham steak in cider, from a book built around the covered earthenware dish. The only real decision is what kind of ham you buy, because that changes the timing completely.
- The hinge: what kind of hamThe long bake suggests a slice off a cured ham that still needed cooking, firm enough to stand three hours of slow braising. A modern supermarket ham steak is usually already fully cooked and brined, and is likely to fall apart over that time; an hour is probably enough. For the long braise, look for an uncooked country ham or a raw gammon slice.
- "Slowly"The recipe says only "bake slowly": a low oven, in the region of 300-325F, suits. Keep the dish covered throughout so the liquid stays around the meat rather than boiling away.
- Sweet ciderIn this American book sweet cider means unfermented apple juice, cloudy and unpasteurised. Ordinary apple juice works; hard cider gives a sharper, drier result and is not what was intended.
- CasseroleThe word here means the lidded earthenware or fireproof pot itself, not a baked mixture. Any deep covered braiser holds a ham slice well; the ham should sit in one layer with cider coming most of the way up it.
- Blade maceMace is the lacy outer covering of the nutmeg, sold in blades a century ago and mostly ground now. Use about a quarter teaspoon of ground mace, or a blade if you can find whole ones, and fish out the bay leaf and cloves before serving.
- SaltingThe "salt and pepper" is a formality with cured ham. Taste the cider liquid before adding any salt at all, especially with modern brined ham.
- Yield and the sauceOne thick slice will serve two or three, or more alongside the stuffed potatoes suggested. The braising cider, strained and reduced in a pan, makes a good sauce.
This is often placed among early twentieth-century cookbooks devoted to a single vessel: the covered fireproof casserole, then a fashionable import into English and American kitchens from French domestic cooking. Ham with apples or cider is far older than the casserole craze and turns up wherever pigs and orchards share ground \, Normandy, the west of England, and the mid-Atlantic and Southern United States, where cured hams were a farm staple and sweet cider was pressed by the barrel each autumn. The sugar and acid in cider do double duty here, softening the salt of a hard country cure and glazing the meat as the liquid reduces.