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Baked Stuffed Ham
Boil the ham until it can easily be skinned, remove the skin, and gash the ham to the bone; fill up the cuts with a forcemeat of sifted breadcrumbs, a very little thyme, finely chopped parsley, a seasoning of salt and pepper, and enough butter to mix these ingredients to a paste. Brush over the ham with the well-beaten yolks of eggs, dust it with sifted breadcrumbs, and bake slowly until quite done. Or if a hot boiled ham be served up, and only a small portion of it used, the spaces where the slices have been taken from may be filled with forcemeat, brushed over with beaten egg, sprinkled with breadcrumbs, and put into an oven until browned, the ham being already sufficiently cooked.
A whole bone-in ham, simmered, slashed, and packed with a buttered herb stuffing before it goes into the oven. The method assumes a dry-cured, uncooked ham of a kind you now have to seek out.
- The ham itselfOscar meant a raw, salt-cured, bone-in ham; the recipe gives no weight. Such a ham needs long boiling before the skin will peel. Most supermarket hams today are wet-cured and sold fully cooked, so the boiling stage is redundant; with one of those, go straight to the second method he describes.
- Soak first if it is a country hamA genuine dry-cured ham should be soaked in cold water for 12 to 24 hours, water changed once or twice, before simmering. Skipping this leaves the meat aggressively salty no matter how long it boils.
- Boil means simmerHold the water at a bare tremble, around 180F, rather than a rolling boil, which tightens the muscle fibres and dries the meat. Reckon roughly 20 minutes per pound; the skin lifts away easily when the ham is done.
- "Bake slowly"A slow oven in this period is usually reckoned somewhere around 250-300F. Forty-five minutes to an hour is enough to set the egg wash and colour the crumbs, since the meat is already cooked through.
- Gash to the boneCut deep parallel slashes about an inch and a half apart, angled slightly so the forcemeat stays put rather than sliding out as the fat renders. This is the point of the dish: every carved slice comes away with a seam of stuffing in it.
- The forcemeatDry, sifted white breadcrumbs rather than fresh soft crumbs will keep the paste from slumping. The recipe asks only for 'enough butter to mix these ingredients to a paste'; softened butter binds it more easily than melted, and it should be worked only until the mixture holds together when squeezed.
- Egg wash and crumbsYolks alone give a deeper colour than whole egg. Loosen them with a spoonful of water so they brush on evenly rather than sitting in streaks.
- The second methodHis alternative is a genuinely useful way to serve a partly carved ham again: pack the exposed hollows with forcemeat, glaze, crumb, and return it to the oven only until browned, as he says. It is a reheating and presentation trick, not a second cooking.
- YieldA large bone-in ham of this sort will serve a full table with a good deal left over, though the recipe itself gives neither a weight nor a number of servings.
Baking a boiled ham under a crumb crust was standard practice in nineteenth-century English and American service, and Oscar Tschirky's version at the Waldorf sits squarely in that tradition rather than departing from it. What distinguishes it is the stuffing pushed into cuts made right down to the bone, a technique associated with southern Maryland ham cookery, where the slashes were filled with greens or a spiced crumb mixture. The second half of the entry may be the more revealing part: one might read it as a hotel kitchen carving from a large ham over successive services needing a way to make the cut face presentable again, since packing the hollows with forcemeat and re-browning would do exactly that. That reading is speculative, but it suggests the economics behind the dining room, where a single ham might have to look intact through more than one sitting.