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Fried Ham and Eggs
Cut slices of ham very thin, trim off the rind, put into a frying-pan, cooking until crisp. Place on a hot platter; pour off some of the grease, then carefully break the eggs separately in a small plate so that no bad be cooked, and slip each egg gently into a frying-pan.
Do not turn them while frying, but gently tip the pan so that the hot lard will be over them all. Cook about three minutes; the white must retain its transparency so that the yolk can be seen through it. Lay a fried egg upon each slice of ham and serve hot.
A two-pan-stage breakfast dish that depends almost entirely on heat control. The one instruction worth obeying is the basting: tip the pan and spoon the hot fat over the eggs rather than flipping them.
- The ham"Ham" here is most likely a dry-cured, salty country-style ham, cut as thin as the recipe asks, rather than the wet-cured deli ham sold in packets. Modern supermarket ham has far more water and will steam rather than crisp; if you use it, blot it dry and expect it to brown, not turn crisp.
- Trimming the rindCut the rind away but leave a rim of fat, which renders and supplies the grease the eggs are cooked in. If your ham is lean, add a spoonful of butter or oil to the pan.
- "Hot lard"The recipe assumes the rendered ham fat, topped up with lard if needed. Any neutral fat or butter works; butter browns faster and will colour the egg whites.
- Breaking eggs onto a plateThis was a real precaution when eggs came from a farmyard and might be days or weeks old with no way to tell. Graded refrigerated eggs rarely need it, though the habit still catches a broken yolk before it reaches the pan.
- Three minutes, and "transparency"The instruction that the white stay translucent enough to see the yolk means the eggs are cooked barely set, sunny side up, with a fully liquid yolk. That takes about three minutes over moderate heat with constant basting; over high heat the bottom sets and browns before the top does.
- Pan temperaturePour off some of the ham fat as directed, and let the pan drop to medium-low before the eggs go in. Fat hot enough to crisp ham will frill and blister an egg white immediately.
- Runny yolksA yolk left liquid is not brought to a pasteurising temperature. It is ordinary breakfast practice, but worth knowing if you are cooking for someone pregnant, elderly, very young or immune-compromised, in which case cook the eggs through.
- YieldOne slice of ham and one egg per person; the recipe scales directly, but fry the eggs in batches rather than crowding the pan, since basting needs room.
Fried ham and eggs is the plainest expression of the American breakfast built on the home-cured hog, and it appears in print precisely because it needed no marketing skill and no leftovers plan: a side of cured ham hung in the cellar or smokehouse and could be cut from as needed, and eggs came from the yard. The instruction to break each egg separately onto a small plate suggests that this book predates reliable egg grading and refrigeration. So does the appearance of lard as the default frying fat, which is generally said to have held that position in American kitchens until commercial vegetable shortening displaced it in the early twentieth century. The insistence that the white stay clear enough to show the yolk seems to reflect a period preference for eggs barely set rather than firmly cooked, and it is a fair test of whether the cook has managed the pan properly.