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Scalloped Ham
2 T butter 1 t flour 1 t dry mustard Pepper to taste Boil milk, thicken with flour, then add butter, ham, etc. Bake onehalf hour. Mrs. Herman Brockmann.
A church-supper recipe written for someone who already knew how it went: the ingredient list is missing both of its main components, and the quantities that survive are token amounts. Treat the printed text as a reminder rather than a formula.
- The missing quantitiesNeither the milk nor the ham is given a measure, and 1 teaspoon of flour will not thicken any usable amount of milk. A workable proportion for a white sauce is 2 tablespoons butter to 2 tablespoons flour to 1 cup milk; the 1 teaspoon in the original may be a slip, or simply shorthand for a cook who knew the proportion.
- "Scalloped" means layeredThe name signals the method the text omits: sliced or diced cooked ham layered in a buttered dish with the sauce poured over, usually with breadcrumbs or cracker crumbs on top. Without crumbs it is simply creamed ham baked in a dish.
- Order of operationsThe instruction to boil the milk and then thicken with flour works better as a roux: melt the butter, stir in the flour, cook a minute, then add hot milk gradually. Flour stirred into boiling milk lumps unless it is first slaked with cold liquid.
- Dry mustardDry mustard powder of the Colman's type is still the right thing here. A teaspoon is assertive against a cup or two of sauce, which is the point with ham.
- Oven heatThe recipe gives no temperature at all. Around 350F for the half hour specified will heat the dish through and brown crumbs; the ham is already cooked, so the baking is for the sauce and the top.
- SaltOnly pepper is called for. Cured ham carries salt of its own, and period cures were often saltier than modern wet-cured supermarket ham; taste the sauce before adding any.
- YieldBuilt on an assumed 2 cups of milk and about a pound of ham, this fills a 1 1/2-quart dish and serves four.
Community cookbooks like this one were typically compiled from members' own submissions, and something of that shows here: Mrs. Brockmann set down the seasonings and left the ham and milk unmeasured. Scalloped dishes -- ingredients layered with a cream sauce and crumbs and baked -- were a common American way of using up cooked meat, and a boiled or baked ham fed a household for days in this way. The word itself is generally traced to the scallop shells that such mixtures were once baked and served in. Its place in the Luncheon Dishes section suggests a midday, use-up-the-Sunday-ham sort of food.