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Ham with Madeira Sauce
Cook some macaroni or spaghetti, with salt and pepper. Make a brown sauce, using plenty of butter, for this dish requires a great deal of sauce, and add to your "roux" some tomatoes in puree (stewed and run through a sieve), a little meat extract, some fried mushrooms, a few drop of good brandy or madeira to your taste. Let your slices of ham heat in this sauce, and when ready, place them in the middle of a flat dish, put the mushrooms or spaghetti round, and put the sauce, very hot, over the ham.
A Difficult Dish Of Eggs And yet this is only fried eggs after all! Put some oil on to heat; if you have not oil use butter, but oil is the best. When the bluish steam rises it is hot enough. Break an egg into a little flat dish, tip up the frying pan at the handle side, and slip the egg into it, then with a wooden spoon turn the egg over on itself; that is, roll the white of it over the yolk as it slips into the pan. If you cannot manage this, let the egg heat for a second, and then roll the white over the yolk with a wooden spoon. Do each egg in this way, and as soon as one is done let it drain and keep warm by the fire. When all are done put them in a circle, in a dish, and pour round them a very hot sauce, either made with tomatoes, or flavored with vinegar and mustard.
The text runs two recipes together: a ham in Madeira-tomato sauce served with pasta, and a separate method for French-style fried eggs. Neither gives quantities, so treat both as a technique rather than a formula.
- The sauce is the dishThe recipe's own word "roux" shows a roux-based brown sauce rather than a thickened gravy; it is close in kind to the classical espagnole family, though the text does not name it. No quantities are given, so any figures are a modern guess: for four, something like 3 tablespoons butter and 3 tablespoons flour cooked to a nut-brown colour, then about 3 cups of good brown stock whisked in and simmered down by a third. The insistence on "a great deal of sauce" means erring generous.
- Meat extractA 1915 kitchen reached for Bovril, Liebig's or a spoonful of homemade glace de viande. A teaspoon of concentrated beef base or a tablespoon of reduced stock does the same job. Add it late and taste before salting, since these are all salty.
- Tomatoes in puree"Stewed and run through a sieve" describes what we would now buy as passata; about 1/2 cup suits this quantity. Note that the recipe says to add it to the "roux"; some cooks prefer to add it to the finished brown sauce instead.
- Madeira, and when to add itA few drops is understated; 2 to 3 tablespoons of Sercial or Verdelho Madeira suits this quantity of sauce. Stir it in off the heat at the end, as prolonged boiling drives off the aromatics that are the point of the dish.
- Heat, do not cook, the hamThe ham is already cooked. Thick slices of a good boiled or baked ham need five minutes barely trembling in the sauce; longer and they tighten and turn stringy, and the salt leaches out into the sauce.
- A garbled line"Put the mushrooms or spaghetti round" may be a slip for the macaroni or spaghetti named in the first sentence, though as printed it can also be read as offering either mushrooms or pasta for the border. Ring the platter with the pasta, keep the mushrooms in the sauce, and pour the sauce over the ham.
- The eggsThis is the classic French fried egg: oil heated until a faint bluish haze rises, as the recipe says, and the white folded over the yolk with a wooden spoon so it sets in a neat parcel. The yolk stays soft, which is worth knowing if you are cooking for anyone who should avoid a runny yolk. Do them one at a time and drain each as it comes out.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities. To feed four you would need roughly 1 1/2 lb of sliced ham and 12 oz of pasta; the eggs are counted one or two per person.
The Belgian Cook-Book was assembled in England in 1915 from recipes contributed by Belgian refugees who had fled the German invasion, and sold in aid of relief work; that origin explains its manner, which is a cook talking from memory rather than a tested formula with weights. Ham with Madeira sauce belongs to the French-trained bourgeois cooking that Belgian households shared with their neighbours to the south: a brown roux built out into sauce madère, a derivative of espagnole in the classical scheme, lifted with tomato and fortified wine. Madeira had long been the cook's wine of choice for such sauces because it is already oxidised and keeps for months after opening, an advantage in any kitchen without refrigeration. The second recipe, the "difficult dish of eggs", is a small joke on the same theme, that technique rather than ingredients is what separates a plain fried egg from a dish worth putting on a platter.< /em>