Ham Pie
Into a baking dish put a layer of potatoes sliced very thin and seasoned. Add a few bits of butter and then a layer of minced ham. Repeat with potatoes and ham until dish is filled. Add enough water to moisten the entire mass, and spread a crust over all. Bake about half an hour in a moderately hot oven. A biscuit crust or pie pastry may be used as for any meat pie. Do not salt too freely, since the ham is apt to be salt enough. For this dish also herbs may be used and a sprinkling of paprika over the ham. An excellent dish for luncheon.
A layered potato-and-ham scallop under a pastry lid, meant to stretch the last of a cooked ham. The original timing is the one thing that needs attention.
- Oven heat"Moderately hot" is usually taken as somewhere around 375-400F, though period oven descriptions vary. Bake at 400F if you want colour on a biscuit crust.
- The half hour is not enoughRaw potatoes sliced thin still need 50-60 minutes at 400F under a lid of pastry, and thicker slices longer. Test by pushing a knife through the crust into the centre: it should meet no resistance. Half an hour works only if the potatoes are parboiled or sliced translucently thin on a mandoline.
- Slice thickness"Very thin" means about 1/8 inch. Uneven slices give you raw layers next to collapsed ones, so keep them consistent and overlap them rather than piling them loose.
- Minced hamThis assumes cooked ham trimmings, chopped small rather than ground. Roughly 2 cups of chopped ham to 2 lb of potatoes fills a standard 9-inch deep dish.
- Water, and how much"Enough to moisten" is about a cup for a 9-inch dish, poured in before the crust goes on. Stock or milk gives a better result; if using milk, expect it to catch at the edges. The liquid should come partway up the layers, not cover them.
- SaltThe warning still holds. Season the potato layers with pepper only and taste the ham first.
- VentingCut a steam vent in the crust. A sealed lid over a cup of water lifts and splits, and the underside goes sodden.
- YieldServes four as the luncheon dish it was intended to be, or six alongside a green salad.
Ham pie of this kind belongs to the long tradition of scalloped-potato dishes built around leftovers from a cured joint, the cheapest way to make a Sunday ham reach into the following week. Books of low-cost cookery from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are full of such layered bakes: the potato supplies bulk, the meat supplies flavour in quantities far too small to serve on their own, and a crust of biscuit dough or trimmings-pastry turns the whole thing into something presentable enough for a luncheon table. The instruction to go easy on the salt is a reminder of how heavily ham was cured when preservation, not taste, set the salt level, and the suggested paprika reflects its spread through American kitchens in this period as a cheap way to add colour and mild warmth to plain food.