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Roast Ham with Champagne Sauce
Place a whole baked ham in the oven fifteen minutes before serving time, that outside fat may be heated. Remove to a hot platter, garnish bone end with a paper ruffle, and serve with Champagne Sauce.
This is a serving instruction rather than a cooking method: the ham has already been baked, and the fifteen minutes in the oven is only to warm and gloss the fat. What matters is what you do before and after.
- "Whole baked ham" means fully cooked alreadyThe recipe assumes a ham already boiled or simmered and then baked, as directed elsewhere in the book. It is not a raw or fresh ham, and fifteen minutes will not cook anything.
- The centre stays coolFifteen minutes only affects the surface. If the ham has been refrigerated, it will need a longer, gentler spell in the oven to warm through before the short finish on the fat; the recipe gives no guidance on this.
- Champagne SauceThe sauce is a separate entry elsewhere in the book and is not reproduced here, so its composition cannot be judged from this page.
- The paper ruffleA frilled paper cuff slipped over the exposed shank bone, sold as a ham frill or cutlet frill. It is purely decorative.
- Yield and carvingA bone-in half ham of 7-8 lb serves roughly 12-16; a whole ham of 14-16 lb will serve well over 20.
Fannie Merritt Farmer's book belongs to a moment when American middle-class households were borrowing the vocabulary of French restaurant cookery, and a wine-finished sauce poured over a homely cured ham is exactly that borrowing in miniature: the ham is New England Sunday dinner, the sauce is the hotel dining room. Cured whole hams are often said to have been among the few large joints a household could keep for some time without refrigeration, and they were baked in advance and, by tradition, appeared repeatedly at the table, which may be why the instruction here is about reheating and presentation rather than cooking. The paper ruffle, the hot platter and the bone end turned toward the carver are period stage directions; a bone-in ham was meant to be seen whole before it was cut, and cookery books of the 1890s give considerable attention to how a dish arrived at the table.