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Baked Ham with Potatoes
Bring to a boil and drain 2 slices of raw ham about one inch thick. Butter a baking dish, lay ham on bottom, fill with sliced raw potatoes cut thick. Dot with two tablespoons butter, season with salt and pepper, add milk until dish is ¾ full. Bake until potatoes are tender, then place ham on top and bake until brown.
A one-dish luncheon bake of scalloped potatoes built on a ham steak. Two things in the text need translating: the parboiling step, and a garbled fraction.
- "Raw ham" means a cured ham steak"Raw ham" means an uncooked ham steak -- not fresh pork but a slice cut from a cured ham, sold now as a bone-in or boneless ham steak about an inch thick. Two such slices come to roughly 2 to 2 1/2 lb.
- Why you boil and drain itHams of the period were often heavily salted, and a brief scald pulls out enough salt to keep the potatoes edible. Modern supermarket ham steaks are far milder; a 2-3 minute scald is plenty, and with a low-sodium ham you can skip it and cut the added salt instead.
- "Until dish is 4 full"A typographical corruption of a fraction, most likely 3/4. In practice add milk until it comes to within about half an inch of the top layer of potatoes; the potatoes should be nearly but not quite submerged.
- OvenThe recipe gives no temperature at all. A moderate oven, around 350F, suits it. Allow roughly 60 to 75 minutes for the potatoes to become tender -- covering the dish helps for this stretch -- then set the ham on top and give it 15 to 20 minutes uncovered to brown.
- Slice the potatoes thinner than "thick"Slice the potatoes no thicker than about 1/4 inch, despite the original's "cut thick." Anything much heavier will still be firm at the centre when the milk has already reduced and caught at the edges.
- CurdlingWhole milk baked uncovered at length can break, especially against salty ham. Cover for the long stretch, or use half milk and half cream, which holds together better.
- YieldA 2-quart dish serves four to six at lunch. It reheats well.
Church and society cookbooks of the early twentieth century leaned hard on dishes like this one: a single baking dish, a cheap cured meat, potatoes, and milk, largely left to the oven. Scalloped potatoes with ham belongs to the broad Anglo-American family of "scallops" — sliced food layered with liquid and baked — a term generally traced to the old practice of baking such mixtures in scallop shells. The instruction to parboil and drain the ham points to a time when a hard-cured slice was common enough that salt had to be drawn out before the meat could be paired with anything as bland as a potato.