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Boiled Ham
Wash the ham, place it in a saucepan, and cover it with hot water; simmer gently for about five hours, then move the saucepan on one side of the fire, and let the ham remain in the water for an hour or two longer. When it is almost cold remove, sprinkle over baked breadcrumbs and three or four tablespoonfuls of fine moist sugar.
This is a whole cured ham simmered in water, then coated while cooling — the standard hotel method for a cold buffet ham. Almost everything hinges on what kind of ham you start with, since the word meant something different in 1896.
- What "ham" means hereOscar assumed a whole bone-in dry-cured ham, raw and heavily salted, which is why it needs five hours. A supermarket "city ham" today is already brine-cured and fully cooked; simmering it five hours would shred it. Use a genuine raw country or dry-cured ham, and taste the soak water — a hard-cured ham may need 12 to 24 hours of cold soaking, with changes of water, before it goes near the pot.
- Timing by weight, not by clockFive hours suits a ham of roughly 12 to 14 lb. Reckon about 20 to 25 minutes per pound at a bare simmer, and go by an instant-read thermometer in the thickest part away from the bone: 145F is the safe minimum for a raw dry-cured ham, though the traditional cue of the shank bone wobbling loose comes only at a higher temperature.
- "Simmer gently" is literalWater at a rolling boil tightens the muscle fibres and drives out the fat, giving dry, stringy slices. Hold the surface at a lazy tremble, around 180F, and skim the scum in the first twenty minutes.
- Moving the pan "on one side of the fire"On a coal range this meant pulling the pot off the hot plate to a cooler part of the top, so the ham finished in falling heat. On a modern hob, turn the burner off and leave the covered pan where it is.
- The cooling windowAn hour or two of resting in the hot liquid keeps the meat juicy and is fine. Do not extend it — an unrefrigerated ham sitting in warm water all afternoon spends hours in the range where bacteria multiply. Once it has stopped steaming, get it into the refrigerator to finish chilling.
- Fine moist sugarThis is British grocer's language for a soft, damp, fine-grained brown sugar, as opposed to the hard loaf sugar sold alongside it. Moist sugars ranged from pale to dark; a light muscovado is a reasonable modern stand-in.
- Baked breadcrumbsAlso called raspings: stale crumbs dried in a low oven until pale gold and sandy. They must be dry, or the coating turns to paste against the damp fat. Peel the rind off the warm ham first so the crumbs and sugar stick to the fat itself.
- Finishing the crustThe recipe leaves the coating as it is, which gives a soft sweet crumb rather than a glaze. If you want it set and lightly caramelised, ten minutes in a hot oven at 425F will do it, but then serve the ham warm rather than cold.
- YieldA 12 lb bone-in ham gives 20 to 25 cold-buffet servings, and the cooking liquid — taste it for salt first — makes a good base for pea or bean soup.
Oscar Tschirky ran the Waldorf's dining rooms from 1893 and published this collection in 1896, when a cold boiled ham was one of the fixed points of a hotel sideboard: coated and carved to order for breakfast, supper and late buffets. The method itself is straight out of English household cookery, where dried breadcrumbs were called raspings and kept in a jar as a matter of course. The long soak-and-simmer reflects the salt load of nineteenth-century dry curing, which was calibrated for keeping meat through a summer rather than for flavour. Cold ham prepared this way also suited a kitchen that had to feed hundreds without reheating anything.