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Scalloped Eggs with Ham
4 hard-boiled eggs 2 cups cold boiled ham chopped fine 1 cup cream sauce 2 cups bread crumbs 2 tablespoon milk Cut egg into slices. Grease dish; cover bottom with one-third of bread crumbs; then add in layers eggs, ham, cream sauce, bread crumbs, being sure to save bread crumbs to cover top. Moisten with milk. Bake in moderate oven 20 minutes.
The cream sauce is made as usual and may be flavored with 1/2 teaspoon grated nutmeg or 1 tablespoon onion juice.
A straightforward layered gratin of two leftovers, with an assumption that the cook already knows how to make a white sauce. A few of the quantities and instructions need translating.
- Moderate oven350F. Twenty minutes is enough only because everything in the dish is already cooked; the bake exists to heat it through and brown the top. If the ham and sauce go in cold from the refrigerator, allow 30 to 35 minutes.
- "Cream sauce made as usual"A basic white sauce of the period ran about 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and 1 cup milk or thin cream, cooked until it coats a spoon. Make it on the thin side here, since the bread crumbs will absorb a good deal of it.
- Bread crumbsThese should be dry crumbs from stale bread, not the fine sandy commercial kind and not fresh soft crumbs, which turn to paste. Toss the crumbs reserved for the top with a tablespoon of melted butter if you want real browning; the two tablespoons of milk alone will only dampen them.
- Season before you assembleThe recipe lists no salt or pepper, and boiled ham is already salty. Taste the ham first and salt the sauce accordingly, then keep a light hand.
- Onion juiceAn old-fashioned way to get onion flavor with no texture: grate a halved onion on a fine grater and use the liquid that collects. A tablespoon is roughly what half a small onion gives.
- NutmegHalf a teaspoon of grated nutmeg in one cup of sauce is assertive by current taste. A quarter teaspoon, or a few scrapes of a whole nutmeg, sits better with ham.
- Egg slicesCut the hard-boiled eggs with a thin, wet knife and lay them in a single layer rather than overlapping; thick stacks of egg tend to firm up unpleasantly in the oven.
- Yield and dishFills a 1 1/2-quart baking dish and serves four as a supper dish, six alongside something else. Let it stand five minutes before serving so the layers hold when cut.
This belongs to the large family of American "scalloped" dishes -- cooked food layered with crumbs and a sauce, baked until the top browns -- which filled the leftovers pages of household cookbooks from the mid-nineteenth century onward. The name is generally traced to cooking in a scallop shell, and by 1900 it meant little more specific than the crumb-and-sauce method. Croquettes, cutlets, timbales and scallops were commonly taught together as answers to the same problem of cooked meat left over, and the scallop was the easiest of them because it required no shaping, no chilling and no deep fat. Ham and hard-boiled egg is a common pairing of the period, appearing also as a sandwich filling, a salad and a stuffing.