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Scalloped Ham and Potatoes
6 potatoes
I green pepper (may be
1 pound raw smoked ham omitted)
3 cups milk (or more)
Flour
Cover the bottom of an oiled baking-dish with sliced, raw potatoes. Sprinkle with flour and inch-square pieces of ham. Repeat until the dish is full. Pour in as much milk as the dish will hold. Bake until the potatoes are tender. The chopped green pepper adds to the flavor.
A plain layered bake from the era when "casserole cookery" still meant anything cooked slowly in one covered dish. The original gives no oven temperature and no time, so both need filling in.
- The garbled ingredient listThe text runs two columns together in the original setting. Read it as: 6 potatoes, 1 pound raw smoked ham, 3 cups milk (or more), flour, and 1 green pepper (may be omitted).
- Oven and timeAssume a moderate oven, 350F. Sliced raw potatoes in milk need roughly 1 1/4 to 1 3/4 hours depending on how thick they are sliced; cover for the first hour so the top does not brown before the middle softens.
- "Raw smoked ham"This means smoked but uncooked ham, the sort that still needed baking — closer to today's country ham or a raw gammon than to the pink deli ham sold as "cooked". A thick-cut smoked ham steak works, but it is already cooked and fully salted, so taste before adding any salt at all.
- Slice thinThe hinge of the dish. Potatoes cut about 1/8 inch will cook through in the time the milk holds together; anything approaching 1/4 inch leaves chalky centres or forces you to bake so long the milk breaks.
- Flour between the layersA light dusting only, perhaps a tablespoon per layer. It is there to thicken the milk into a sauce as it bakes; heaped on, it goes pasty.
- Keeping the milk from curdlingSalty ham and a hot oven will curdle whole milk. Keep the heat moderate, and if the surface looks grainy it has gone too hot — it still tastes fine but will not be smooth.
- Milk level"As much as the dish will hold" is best read as filling to just below the top layer rather than over it. Around 3 cups suits a 2-quart dish, and the recipe allows for more; the potatoes will drink most of it.
- YieldServes four to six as a main dish. It rests and reheats well.
Scalloped potatoes carry an old English kitchen word: to "scallop" is usually explained as cooking in a scallop shell, then in any small dish, and by the nineteenth century simply baking sliced food in layers with sauce or crumbs. Butterick, the dress-pattern company, published this book for the same audience it sold patterns to — households doing their own work — and the casserole chapter reflects an enthusiasm of the 1910s and 1920s for one-dish oven meals, encouraged by home economists as a way to stretch meat and cut fuel. A pound of ham feeding six is very much the point of the recipe. The green pepper is offered as optional, which may say something about how familiar it then was in Northern American kitchens.