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Scalloped Ham and Potatoes
Put through the chopper enough cold boiled ham to give 1½ cupfuls. Cut 6 large boiled potatoes in thin slices. In a saucepan mix together 2 tablespoonfuls each of butter and flour, 1 scant teaspoonful of salt and 1/3 of a teaspoonful of white pepper. When bubbling, stir in gradually 1 pint of hot milk and cook until smoothly thickened.
In a buttered dish put alternate layers of potato, ham and sauce until all are used. With 1/2 cupful of stale bread crumbs, mix 1 tablespoonful of melted butter, spread this over the top and bake in a quick oven until browned.
New Potatoes as Prepared in the South Scrape and boil, as usual, medium sized and small new potatoes. Place a quantity of butter in the frying-pan, and when brown put the potatoes in whole, turning them again and again until they are nicely browned on all sides.
A straightforward layered gratin built on a basic white sauce, and a good use for the end of a boiled ham. The quantities are workable once a few of the older conventions are read correctly.
- Quick ovenRoughly 400-425F in modern terms, though period usage varies. Everything in the dish is already cooked, so you are only heating through and colouring the top: take it out when the crumbs have browned and the sauce is bubbling at the edges.
- The ham quantityThe amount of chopped ham printed here has lost its whole number and reads only as a fraction. For six large potatoes and a pint of sauce, 1 1/2 to 2 cups of ground ham is the sensible range; less than a cup will disappear into the dish.
- Put through the chopperA hand-cranked meat grinder. A food processor pulsed a few times gives the same coarse mince, though it is easy to overshoot into paste, so work in short bursts.
- The sauce is the hingeCook the butter and flour until it actually bubbles and smells nutty before the milk goes in, and add the hot milk gradually with constant stirring. A pint of milk to two tablespoons each of butter and flour gives a deliberately thin sauce, which is what you want; it needs to run between the potato slices rather than sit on them.
- SaltBoiled ham is already salty. Taste the sauce before adding the full scant teaspoon, and hold some back if the ham is a commercial cured one.
- White pepperUsed here so the sauce stays unspeckled. Black pepper can be substituted if appearance does not matter, though the flavour is not quite the same.
- Stale bread crumbsDry crumbs from day-old bread, not the fine dried sort sold in canisters, which pack down and turn sandy. Tear and pulse fresh-ish bread, then toss with the melted butter so every crumb is coated.
- YieldSix large potatoes and a pint of sauce make a substantial quantity, about enough for a 9x13 dish; figure on six as a main course with a salad, or eight as a side.
Scalloped dishes -- thin slices layered with a milk sauce and baked under crumbs -- were among the workhorses of American home cooking from the mid-nineteenth century onward, and the word itself is often traced to the scallop shells in which such mixtures were once baked and served individually, though it has also been linked to "escalope", a thin slice. In a book of low-cost recipes, the ham is a seasoning, a half-pound or so stretched across six potatoes and a pint of milk to feed a table. Cold boiled ham left from a Sunday joint was exactly the sort of remnant thrift cookery was organised around, and the white sauce, cheap and filling, did the work of making a little meat taste like more.