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Fried Ham and Eggs
Wipe ham, remove one-half outside layer of fat, and place in frying-pan. Cover with tepid water and let stand on back of range thirty minutes; drain, and dry on a towel. Heat pan, put in ham, brown quickly on one side, turn and brown other side; or soak ham over night, dry, and cook in hot frying-pan. If cooked too long, ham will become hard and dry. Serve with fried eggs cooked in the tried-out ham fat.
This is a slice of dry-cured, salty country ham, not the mild wet-cured supermarket ham of today, and nearly every instruction here exists to manage that salt.
- The hinge: don't overcook itA ham slice is already cured and needs only browning; the book says simply to brown it quickly on each side over a hot pan. Fannie Farmer's warning that it will "become hard and dry" is the whole point of the recipe.
- Whether to soak at allThe thirty-minute tepid soak (or overnight) draws out salt from a dry-cured country ham. If you are using ordinary sliced supermarket ham or a mild wet-cured steak, skip the soak entirely; it will only make the meat watery.
- "Back of range"On a coal or wood range, the back was the cool zone: gentle residual warmth rather than cooking heat. Here it means little more than letting the pan stand somewhere barely warm, enough to keep the water tepid.
- "Tried-out" fatRendered fat. Half the outer fat is trimmed off first — the book does not say why — and what renders from the remainder is the cooking medium for the eggs.
- Slice thicknessThe recipe does not specify a thickness. Thin deli slices will curl and dry before they colour, so a thicker cut steak suits the method better.
- Drying the meatPatting the slice thoroughly dry after soaking is not fussiness — wet ham steams rather than browns, and you lose the crust that makes the dish.
Ham and eggs was a staple breakfast of nineteenth-century America, resting on the fact that a home-cured ham hung in the smokehouse kept without refrigeration and could be cut from as needed. The salt that made that possible is what the soaking step here is fighting: country hams could be cured salty enough to want soaking or parboiling before frying, and such instructions appear in cookbooks throughout the period. The instruction to fry the eggs in the rendered ham fat reflects an older kitchen economy in which nothing renderable was poured away — the same logic that put bacon drippings in a crock beside the stove.