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Broiled Boned Ham
Wash a ham, place it in a saucepan, cover it with cold water, and boil it for four or five hours, according to its size. Take out the bone, roll the ham, place it in a basin with a large weight on the top. When cold put it on a dish, garnish with parsley, and serve.
Despite the title, nothing here is broiled: this is a boiled ham, boned while hot, rolled and pressed cold into a sliceable galantine. The hinge is the pressing — the ham must be rolled and weighted while still hot enough for its gelatin to be liquid, or it will never bind.
- Do not actually boil itA hard boil for four hours will squeeze the muscle dry and leave it stringy. Hold the water at a bare shiver, 180-190F, and reckon roughly 20 minutes per pound. The original gives no weight, only "according to its size," though four or five hours implies a large bone-in ham.
- Know which ham you boughtThe ham assumed here is almost certainly an uncooked cured ham, bone in, which needs the long boil both to cook it and to draw out salt; the recipe itself does not say how it was cured. Nearly all supermarket "ham" today is wet-cured and fully cooked, so this treatment would only overcook it. Ask for an uncooked ham, bone in.
- Soak first if it is a country hamA traditional salt-cured ham should be soaked in several changes of cold water for 12-24 hours before it goes into the pot, and the first cooking water discarded. Skip this and the finished roll is inedibly salty.
- Basin and weight"Basin" means a deep round bowl or a mould, not a bathroom fixture. Line it with plastic wrap, pack the boned ham in tightly, cover with a plate that just fits inside, and set 5-10 lb on top — a foil-wrapped brick, a Dutch oven, or filled cans.
- Bone it hotLift the ham out, pull the skin, and take out the bone and the larger internal fat seams while it is too hot to handle comfortably. Once it cools the natural gelatin sets and the layers will not fuse.
- Chill in the refrigerator"When cold" in 1896 would have meant cooling in a larder or ice-chest. Put the weighted basin straight into the refrigerator and leave it 8-12 hours; a large mass of warm meat left standing at room temperature is the one real risk in the method.
- Serving and yieldTurn out, and carve in thin slices across the roll with a long knife — this is a cold buffet dish, not a hot one. A ham large enough to need four or five hours will yield a great many thin slices.
Pressed boned ham of this kind was standard cold-buffet work in the grand hotels of the 1890s, and its logic is French charcuterie: cook, bone, roll, weight, chill, so that a whole muscle becomes a neat cylinder that a carver can serve identically a hundred times. Oscar Tschirky ran the Waldorf's dining rooms rather than its stoves, and his 1896 collection reads throughout like a working list of preparations a maitre d'hotel needed to recognize and order he the the mismatched title, which probably belongs to a broiled slice cut from a ham prepared this way. Buffets, cold sideboards and ballroom suppers all wanted meat that held its shape at room temperature, and the weighted basin was the cheapest way to get it.