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Ham Casserole
Slice a layer of potatoes, then a layer of onions into the casserole or baking dish. Salt and pepper as you do so. Spread prepared mustard on a slice of ham and put it in the dish. Add more potatoes and onions until the dish is nearly full. Add milk or water until it barely reaches the top layer.
Ham or pork chops may also be baked with apples, pineapple or sweet potatoes in this same way, or apples and sweet potatoes may be baked without the meat.
A scalloped-potato bake with a ham slice buried in the middle. The original gives no oven temperature and no timing, which is normal for a camp or scout-book recipe written when the cook was expected to judge by eye.
- Oven and timeBake covered at 350F for about 1 hour 15 minutes, then uncovered another 20 to 30 minutes to brown. It is done when a knife slides through the centre potatoes with no resistance.
- "Casserole" hereThe recipe's own wording, "the casserole or baking dish", uses the word for the vessel: any deep baking dish or a Dutch oven, ideally lidded. If you have no lid, foil crimped over the rim does the same work, and matters more than it sounds, since uncovered potatoes dry out before they cook through.
- Slice thin, and evenlyThe hinge of the dish. Aim for about 1/8 inch and no more than 1/4 inch; slices much thicker than that risk still being firm when the top has browned, and even thickness matters as much as thinness.
- The ham sliceA single thick centre-cut ham steak, roughly 3/4 inch and 1 to 1 1/2 lb, suits a dish of this size. Modern supermarket ham is likely to be wetter and milder than a home-cured ham, so it should not need soaking, but it will release salt into the potatoes.
- Go easy on the saltThe instruction to salt each layer assumes potatoes doing battle with nothing else. Between cured ham and prepared mustard there is plenty already; season the layers lightly and taste before serving.
- Milk or waterMilk gives a richer, faintly curdled sauce and can catch at the edges; water lets the potato starch and ham do the thickening. Either way, liquid should come just to the top layer and no further, or the dish will be soupy.
- Quantities and yieldRoughly 2 1/2 lb potatoes, two medium onions and about 2 cups liquid make a generous 2- to 3-quart bake and feed six. Nothing in the original is measured, so treat these as a starting point.
- The variationsApples release juice and soften well before white potatoes, so an apple-and-sweet-potato version wants less added liquid and can be checked from about 45 minutes; sweet potatoes on their own cook in roughly the same time as white ones. Pineapple adds enough juice that you may need almost no added liquid at all.