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Ham Patties
1 cup cold chopped ham 1/4 cup fine bread crumbs 1 tablespoon butter 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/4 teaspoon pepper 1 cup milk Mix the ingredients thoroughly and put a layer in the bottom patty of buttered patty cups. Break an egg over the top of each; dust with pepper and salt; cover with fine bread or cracker crumbs and bake about eight minutes in a quick oven. • Veal Croquettes
A leftover-ham dish built around a baked egg, from a period when "patty" meant the small cup a mixture was baked in rather than a flat cake of meat. A few of the quantities need judgment before you start.
- Patty cupsThese are small deep tins or cups, essentially a muffin pan or a set of 4 oz ramekins. Butter them well; the ham mixture sticks as it browns.
- A quick ovenNo temperature is given; 'quick' is conventionally reckoned at roughly 400-450F. At that heat eight minutes will set the white and leave the yolk soft to runny. Add two or three minutes if you want the yolk firm.
- The milk is the problemOne cup of milk to one cup of chopped ham and a quarter cup of crumbs gives a soupy mixture that will not hold a layer in the bottom of a cup. Either bind it into a thick paste with far less milk (start with two or three tablespoons) or treat the milk as the base of a stiff white sauce made with the butter and extra crumbs. As written the proportion cannot be taken literally.
- ButterMelt it before mixing, or rub it into the crumbs. Left in a cold lump it will not distribute through the ham.
- SaltHalf a teaspoon assumes mildly cured ham. Modern supermarket ham is salty enough that you should taste the mixture and probably cut the salt to a pinch.
- The crumb lidFine crumbs over a wet egg go pasty. Toss them with a little melted butter first so they crisp rather than steam.
- YieldEnough for four to six cups depending on their size, one egg each. Serve immediately in the cups or turn out onto toast; they collapse as they cool.
- Egg donenessIf serving to anyone who should avoid a soft yolk, bake until the yolk is set through rather than relying on the eight minutes.
Ham patties belong to the large family of American recipes whose real purpose is the disposal of cold cooked meat, a category that occupies whole chapters in household cookbooks of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when a boiled or baked ham was expected to feed a family across several days. Baking an egg over a bed of seasoned meat or sauce in individual cups was a standard breakfast and luncheon treatment, related to the French oeufs en cocotte and to the dozens of "shirred egg" recipes of the same period. The neighboring entry is for veal croquettes, another second-day treatment of cooked meat.