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Ham Loaf
¼ pound lean ham
¼ pound grated cheese
2 tablespoons flour
3 eggs
2 cups milk
Salt and pepper
Cook the ham and chop it fine. Mix the flour with the milk and cook for a few minutes; then add the ham, cheese, the egg-yolks slightly beaten, and the stiffly beaten egg-whites. Season with salt and pepper, pour into a mold, set the mold in a pan of hot water and bake in a slow oven until firm. This may be served with or without a thin white sauce.
ECONOMICAL SAUCE FOR COLD MEAT AND FISH 4 tablespoons salad oil
Mustard
4 tablespoons cream
Salt
3 tablespoons vinegar
Pepper
Mix the salad oil, cream, vinegar, a little mustard, salt and pepper. Beat together quickly, with an egg-beater. The sauce gets white quickly and looks like whipped cream. Soon it becomes as thick as the best-made mayonnaise. Moreover, eggs are not required, the sauce will not curdle, and can be made quickly.
A baked ham-and-cheese custard, lightened with beaten egg whites and set in a water bath. It reads as a savoury soufflé pudding rather than the dense pressed loaf the name suggests today.
- The quantities of ham and cheeseBoth are given as a fraction of a pound that has not survived legibly in this printing; a quarter pound (about 4 oz / 115 g) of each is the proportion that balances 2 cups of milk and 3 eggs. Treat any larger reading with suspicion, as more solids will make it heavy.
- Slow oven300F (150C). The custard should set gently; anything hotter will curdle it and weep water into the mold even in a bain-marie.
- TimingNone is given. Set in hot water, expect roughly 50 to 70 minutes, until the centre is just firm to a light press and a knife comes out clean.
- "Mix the flour with the milk and cook"This is a thin white sauce made without butter. Whisk the flour into cold milk first to avoid lumps, then cook two or three minutes until it thickens slightly, and let it cool to warm before the yolks go in or they will scramble.
- The hingeFold the stiff whites in last, in two additions, and stop while streaks are still faintly visible. The lift of the loaf depends entirely on them, and overmixing at this stage produces a rubbery slab.
- Water bathHot water should reach halfway up the mold. Top it up if it boils away; boiling water rather than simmering will overheat the sides of the custard.
- "Cook the ham"Modern supermarket ham is already fully cooked, so this step is unnecessary. Use a piece of cooked ham and chop or pulse it fine, keeping some texture rather than reducing it to paste.
- SaltHam and cheese both carry plenty. Season at the end, after tasting the milk mixture, rather than measuring salt in blind.
- YieldServes four as a light main dish, six as a first course. Good hot from the mold, and firm enough to slice cold the next day.
The mold, the water bath, the whipped whites and the optional thin white sauce are the vocabulary of the pain and the timbale taught in turn-of-the-century cookery schools. Dishes of this kind earned their place in household manuals because they stretched a small quantity of cured meat with milk, flour and eggs into a full dish, and because a mold could be assembled in the morning and baked while the oven was already hot for something else. The name has since drifted: a ham loaf on an American table today is usually ground ham and pork bound with crumbs and glazed, a very different and much sturdier thing.