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Broiled Ham, Milk Gravy
Purchase an inch-thick slice ham, remove rind and cut gashes in the fat, scoring it. Broil until browned, turning once. Make the milk gravy with drippings in the broiler pan, first adding a tablespoon of flour to each tablespoon of the ham fat, and then stirring in 1 cup hot milk to that amount. Make as regular white sauce. Flour may be browned if desired.
A one-page menu instruction rather than a full recipe: it assumes you know how to build a white sauce and can judge a thick ham steak by eye. Two things decide whether it works — the kind of ham you buy, and getting the flour-to-fat ratio right before any milk goes in.
- Which hamAn inch-thick slice with the rind still attached points to an older-style cured ham, which may be markedly salty; some dry-cured slices benefit from soaking or parboiling first. A modern supermarket ham steak is wet-cured, mild, already rindless and often thinner, so skip any soaking and shorten the cooking accordingly.
- Why you score the fatAn unscored fat border contracts faster than the lean and curls the slice off the pan, so it browns in patches. Cut through the fat at one-inch intervals, down to but not into the meat.
- Broiler heat and timeSet the rack about 4 to 5 inches below a preheated element. A true inch-thick slice wants roughly 8 to 10 minutes a side; a thin modern steak 3 to 4 minutes a side, long enough to brown and heat through. With a fully cooked or long dry-cured ham you are mainly browning it, but any ham sold uncooked should be cooked right through.
- Move the drippingsA slotted broiler pan drains fat into the lower tray, where it cannot be whisked and scorches over direct heat. Pour the drippings into a small skillet and make the gravy there, scraping in any browned bits from the pan.
- The ratioEqual tablespoons of fat and flour, then 1 cup hot milk per tablespoon of each — a standard thin white sauce. Cook the flour in the fat for a full minute before the milk, and add the milk hot to avoid lumps. Two tablespoons of each with 2 cups milk feeds four generously.
- Browned flourTaking the roux to a light hazelnut colour gives the darker, nuttier gravy the note implies, but browned flour has less thickening power. Expect a thinner sauce, or use a little more flour.
- Salt lastDo not season the gravy until the end. Ham drippings can carry enough salt to finish the sauce on their own, especially with a dry-cured slice.
- Yield and serviceOne inch-thick slice serves three to four. Serve immediately with the gravy in a boat; it thickens noticeably as it stands, and a splash of hot milk will loosen it.
Milk or "cream" gravy built in the pan a ham has just cooked in is a long-standing thrift habit in American cooking: the fat and the browned fond are treated as a second ingredient rather than waste, and flour and milk stretch them to cover potatoes, biscuits, hominy or the ham itself. It is the pale cousin of Southern red-eye gravy, where the drippings are deglazed with coffee or water and left unthickened. The instruction to make it "as regular white sauce" reflects a habit of teaching in which a single fat-flour-liquid formula stood in for a range of separate sauces, so a writer could name the ratio and trust the reader to take it from there. Broiling rather than frying the slice, and the note that the flour "may be browned if desired," belong to the same brisk, tabulated style.