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Ten Minute Ham
Melt a couple tablespoons of butter in a saucepan, stir in half as much mustard, a jigger of sherry and twice that much catsup. When everything's steaming lay in slices of baked spiced southern ham and when they're heated through pass 'em out on split freshly made and buttered biscuit, with all the pan juice poured over.
A chafing-dish sauce with ham warmed through in it, meant to be assembled fast at the grill rather than cooked. Nothing here needs to reach temperature except the sauce, so the whole thing lives or dies on not overheating the meat.
- The measurements, in cups and spoonsTwo tablespoons butter, one tablespoon mustard ("half as much"), a jigger of sherry is 1 1/2 fl oz or 3 tablespoons, and "twice that much" catsup is 3 fl oz, 6 tablespoons or a generous third of a cup. The recipe gives no yield; that is roughly enough sauce for six to eight thin slices.
- Which mustardThe text does not say. In a sauce of this kind it is more likely prepared yellow or a sharp brown mustard than dry powder. If you use dry English mustard, a tablespoon will overwhelm the 3 oz of catsup; start with a teaspoon.
- Baked spiced southern hamThis means a cooked, cured, often clove-and-sugar-glazed ham, already fully baked and sliced. A supermarket spiral-cut ham is the closest equivalent. Uncooked country ham is a different animal and will be far too salty and too raw for this treatment.
- Heat, not simmerThe hinge of the dish. The ham is already cooked, so it goes in only long enough to warm, a minute or so a side over low heat. Held at a simmer it tightens and turns dry and stringy, and the sherry cooks off to nothing.
- Slice thicknessCut about 1/8 inch, thin enough to fold into a biscuit. Thick slabs will not heat through in the time the sauce can stand without reducing to paste.
- BiscuitsSplit hot, buttered, and filled at once. Baked in advance and reheated they go leathery, and the pan juice needs a soft crumb to soak into.
- YieldNo yield is given. The quantities suggest six to eight small sandwiches.
Ham on a split biscuit is old Southern household cooking, a standard use for the last of a baked ham. What dates this version is the sauce: butter, mustard, sherry and ketchup stirred together in a pan is the quick pan cookery associated with chafing-dish suppers, a style that ran from late-Victorian supper parties through the mid-twentieth-century cocktail hour, where the point was a hot dish made in a few minutes with no oven. The breezy "pass 'em out" reads as a book addressed to a host cooking with guests standing around him.