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Frizzled Ham
Cut about one pound of fat ham into as thin slices as possible. Put a fryingpan over the fire, and let it become smoking hot, then put in the slices of ham and fry for two or three minutes; dust them with dry flour, and cook until the flour is brown. During this time mix one tablespoonful each of vinegar and dry mustard together. When brown add the mustard and vinegar, and sufficient boiling water to cover the ham. Boil gently for a moment, and serve. Eggs may be cooked with the ham in place of the flour and water.
A pan-gravy dish that depends entirely on the ham being cut thin and the pan being genuinely hot. Everything else takes about five minutes.
- The hinge: slice thin, pan smoking"As thin as possible" means shaved, near-deli thickness, so the edges curl and crisp in the first minute. A pan that is merely hot will steam the ham grey and leach it dry instead of frizzling it.
- "Fat ham" is dry-cured"Fat ham" is likely dry-cured -- in the 1890s a fat ham would generally have been a salt-cured, country-style ham with enough fat to fry itself and the flour, though the recipe specifies only "fat ham." Modern wet-cured supermarket ham is milder and wetter; it may need a little butter or oil in the pan and will give a blander gravy. A slice of country ham or a prosciutto-style dry cure is probably closer to what was meant.
- A tablespoon of dry mustard is a lotWith a single pound of ham this reads as aggressively sharp by current taste. Start with a teaspoon or two of mustard powder to the tablespoon of vinegar and add more once the gravy is loose.
- SaltAdd none. A properly cured ham plus reduced pan liquid is salty enough that seasoning at the end is the only sensible order.
- "Sufficient boiling water to cover"Use it sparingly, a few tablespoons at a time. The flour has been browned to thicken a gravy, and drowning the pan gives you thin mustard water rather than a sauce that clings.
- "Boil gently for a moment"Taken literally: 30 seconds to a minute, just to bind the flour and cook the raw edge off the mustard. Any longer and thin ham turns to leather.
- The egg variationThe recipe offers eggs "in place of the flour and water" and says nothing either way about the mustard and vinegar. The simplest reading is to break the eggs into the hot ham fat once the slices have curled and fry or baste until the whites set, which makes it a breakfast dish rather than a gravy dish.
- Yield and servingOne pound serves three or four. The gravy wants something starchy under it -- hominy grits, split biscuits, boiled potatoes or toast.
"Frizzle" is an old English cooking verb for frying something thin until it shrivels and browns at the edges, and it appears in nineteenth-century American cookbooks applied to dried beef and thin ham -- frizzled beef in cream was a common chafing-dish supper. What is set down here is a hotel kitchen's version of a homely country practice: hard-cured ham fried in its own fat, the browned drippings loosened into a sharp gravy. The vinegar-and-mustard finish invites comparison with the coffee-deglazed red-eye gravy of the American South, both answers to the question of what to do with a salty pan after the ham comes out. Its presence in a Waldorf book is a reminder that the hotel's celebrated kitchen served plain breakfast and chafing-dish food alongside the grand menus.