Frizzled Ham
Shave uncooked ham as thin as paper, fat and lean together; put in a frying pan over a quick fire; stir constantly until it begins to brown and curl. Add several tablespoons of boiling water; bring to a boil and serve.
A two-minute skillet dish that depends entirely on how thin the ham is cut. Everything else is a matter of not walking away from the pan.
- "Uncooked ham"This means raw dry-cured ham — a country ham or similar salt-cured leg — not the pink, wet-cured, fully cooked ham sold as ham steak today. A cooked ham will work in the pan but will not develop the same salty, browned edge; if you use one, cut the cooking time to seconds a side.
- Shaving itPaper-thin is the whole recipe. Firm the piece in the freezer for 20-30 minutes and cut across the grain with a long thin blade, or ask a butcher to run it on the slicer at its thinnest setting. Thick slices will not curl; they will simply toughen.
- "A quick fire"High heat — medium-high to high on a modern burner, in a heavy skillet. The fat renders as it goes, so no added fat is needed at the start.
- TimingTwo to three minutes total. The visual cues in the original are the real instruction: pull it as soon as the edges brown and the slices buckle. Cured ham this thin goes from crisp to leathery very fast.
- The boiling waterThis is a pan gravy, not a rinse. Several tablespoons of boiling water lift the browned salt and fat off the pan; boil it up for a few seconds and pour it over the ham. Use boiling water, not cold, so the pan does not drop temperature and the fat does not seize.
- SaltSeason nothing. Dry-cured ham plus a reduced pan liquid is already at the limit; taste before adding anything to whatever it accompanies.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no quantity; a few paper-thin slices per person suits a breakfast or supper dish, with the pan liquid spooned over. It sits naturally alongside eggs, hominy, grits, biscuits or fried apples, though the original names no accompaniment.
Frizzling is an old English and American term for cooking something thin in a hot dry pan until it curls at the edges — the word describes the shape the meat takes, not a sauce or a coating. The technique belongs to the era of the home-cured ham, when a family had a whole salted leg hanging and shaved from it as needed; paper-thin slices were the economical way to stretch an expensive, intensely salty meat across a breakfast table. The final splash of boiling water is akin to what Southern cooks call red-eye gravy, made with water or with coffee, and is a habit of thrift as much as flavour: it recovers everything stuck to the pan.