Broiled Ham
Take a thin slice of ham; pare off the skin; remove the brown fat from the under side of the slices and lay them on a gridiron over a hot fire. When the fat is slightly browned turn over and cook the other side in the same way. If the ham is very old and salty it should be stewed a few minutes before either broiling or frying. Let it simmer in a frying pan; pour off the water and dry on a clean towel.
A method rather than a formula, written for dry-cured country ham cut thin and cooked over coals. Two things carry it: the pre-soak for salty ham, and keeping the heat brief.
- Which ham this means"Ham" here is a whole dry-cured, often long-aged leg, sliced at home — closer to today's country ham than to the wet-cured, pre-sliced deli ham. Modern supermarket ham is already mild and moist and needs no simmering at all.
- The gridiron, translatedA gridiron was a rack of iron bars set over live coals. A ridged cast-iron grill pan or an outdoor grill gives the same effect; a heavy skillet over high heat works, though you lose the char lines.
- Thin means thinAim for about 1/4 inch. Thicker slices of a salty cured ham dry out and toughen before the interior warms through.
- TimingOn a hot surface each side needs roughly one to two minutes, no more. Salt-cured ham sliced thin wants little more than heating and browning; held longer it goes leathery and the salt tastes harsher. Note that curing preserves rather than cooks, so a raw dry-cured slice should be heated right through, not merely marked.
- The de-salting simmerCover the slice with water in a skillet, bring to a bare simmer for three to five minutes, then drain and pat dry. Drying matters — wet ham steams instead of browning. Taste a corner of the drained slice before deciding whether it needs a second change of water.
- The trimmed fatRather than discarding the brown underside fat, render a scrap of it in the pan first and use the drippings for eggs, or for a splash of coffee or water swirled in the hot pan to make red-eye gravy.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity; one slice per person as a breakfast portion is a sensible modern reckoning. Serve straight from the heat, as broiled ham stiffens as it cools.
Broiled ham belongs to the American breakfast table of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when a cured leg hung in the cellar or smokehouse and was sliced off as needed through the year. The instruction to stew old, salty ham first is a clue to how those hams were made: salt was the preservative, and a ham that had hung a year or two could be genuinely too salty to eat unsoaked. Meat sections in books of this kind lean heavily on short technique notes rather than measured recipes — the assumption being that the reader already knew what a gridiron was and needed only the order of operations. As commercial wet-curing and refrigeration spread through the twentieth century, hams grew milder and wetter, and the soaking step largely dropped out of American cook books.