Home › Come and Get It! › Ham Toast
Ham Toast
Chop some lean ham fine, put it in a pan with a little pepper, a lump of butter, and 2 beaten eggs. When well warmed, spread on hot campfire toast well buttered, and serve.
Pieces of cold beefsteak, or roast, make a nice dish prepared in the same way, omitting the eggs and using a little water. Also pieces of cold steak or roast may be chopped fine, water added, seasoned with salt and pepper, and thickened with a little flour, to be eaten with its own gravy in place of the toast.
With a healthy serving of Colorado pinto beans you have a regular meal. The pinto bean, popular throughout the West and Southwest, is a mottled kidney bean, in Spanish a "painted" bean. Also there's the small Colorado wild potato, related to the cultivated potato, which makes it pretty soft for campers who know the many foods furnished free by Mother Nature.
I BEATEN EGG 1/2 TEASPOON
A camp scramble bound with ham rather than the reverse, meant for a skillet over coals. The original gives no quantities, so work by proportion.
- Working proportionsAbout 1 cup of finely chopped cooked lean ham to 2 eggs and a tablespoon of butter feeds two. More ham than that and the eggs stop binding; more eggs and you have ham-flecked scrambled eggs instead.
- The hinge: low heat"When well warmed" is the whole instruction and it means barely set. Pull the pan off direct flame to the edge of the fire and stir constantly; if the eggs firm up and weep, they have gone too far and the mixture will slide off the toast.
- SaltNo salt is listed for the ham version, and cured ham carries plenty on its own. Season only at the end, after tasting.
- "A lump of butter"Roughly a tablespoon. Its job is to keep the egg from gripping the pan, so a cast-iron skillet wants the full amount.
- The beef variationCold steak or roast chopped fine, moistened with water and thickened with about a teaspoon of flour per cup of meat, is a small pan gravy — a hash. Add the water first, let it come to a simmer, then sprinkle the flour in while stirring or it will lump.
- Campfire toastBread held on a green stick or laid on a grate over embers, not flame; it colours in under a minute a side. Butter it hot so the butter soaks in before the ham mixture goes on.
- Pinto beansDried pintos need soaking and one to two hours of simmering, which on a camp fire means starting them long before the ham. Canned pintos, drained and warmed, stand in without complaint.
- On the wild potatoThe Colorado wild potato mentioned at the end is a true Solanum, and wild tubers in that genus vary a great deal in bitter glycoalkaloids. Treat the passage as period colour rather than instruction and leave foraged tubers alone unless identified by someone competent.