Stewed Ham
Cut a thin slice of ham; divide into narrow strips two inches long; pour boiling water on it; let stand until cold; drain off the water and put the ham in a frying pan. Add a bunch of chopped parsley and about a cup of cream; stew for five minutes and serve.
A five-minute skillet dish built around one obsolete assumption: that the ham on hand is a hard, heavily salt-cured country ham. Nearly every instruction follows from that.
- The blanching step is the hingePouring boiling water over the strips and letting them stand until cold draws out salt from a dry-cured ham. With modern wet-cured supermarket ham the step is largely pointless and will leach out what little flavor there is; skip it unless you are working with a genuine country ham.
- "A thin slice of ham"No weight is given. Depending on the size of the ham, a thin slice may come to something in the range of 4 to 6 oz, which with a cup of cream makes two modest servings.
- Cream"Cream" in books of this period was not a standardised term and often meant something thinner than today's heavy cream, nearer light cream or half-and-half. Heavy cream works and thickens faster, so watch the five minutes rather than trusting it.
- Stew for five minutesThat is all the thin strips need. The five minutes is for reducing the cream to a coating consistency, not for tenderizing.
- Parsley"A bunch" is generous by modern habit; roughly a quarter cup chopped is a reasonable reading. Add half at the start and the rest off the heat so some stays green.
- SeasoningNo salt is called for and none should be added until you taste at the end. Black pepper and a scrape of nutmeg are period-appropriate additions to a cream sauce of this kind.
- ServingGood over toast, split biscuits, or hot rice, though the recipe says only "serve." Two servings.
The recipe itself is older than the book: creamed ham with parsley is a thrifty way to stretch the last of a cured ham, and the boiling-water soak reflects a period when a great deal of American ham was dry-salted and smoked for long keeping rather than injected with brine. Country hams of that sort were often too salty to eat straight from the slicer, and soaking or blanching before cooking was common advice. Dishes like this one, served on toast, filled much the same slot in a household's week that hash and creamed chipped beef did.