Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Ham and Egg Toasts
Ham and Egg Toasts
Chop finely some cold cooked ham, toast some slices of bread and butter them. Spread the ham on the toast, and put them in the oven for three or four minutes. Beat six eggs in a teacupful of milk, and add a little salt and pepper. Put two table-spoonfuls of butter in a saucepan, pour in the beaten eggs, and stir over the fire until thick, but do not let boil. Arrange the ham on a dish, the toast also, pour the eggs over, and serve.
A plain chafing-dish supper dish that depends entirely on how gently the eggs are handled. Everything else is assembly.
- The hinge: never let the eggs boilSix eggs with that much milk will curdle and weep the moment they catch. Keep the pan over low heat, stir constantly, and pull it off while the curds are still glossy and slightly loose — they finish setting in the residual heat and again under the warm toast.
- A teacupful of milkA period teacupful is not a fixed measure; it is generally reckoned somewhere between about 4 and 6 fl oz, not a modern 8-oz mug. Taken at the upper end that is around 3/4 cup of milk to six eggs, a very slack mixture; 1/4 to 1/3 cup gives a firmer scramble if you prefer one.
- The oven stepNo temperature is given because the toast is only being warmed through with the ham. Any moderate oven will do; around 350F for the stated three or four minutes works, and longer dries the toast to a cracker.
- Cold cooked hamAny cooked ham works, but a dry-cured or country ham is much saltier than a mild boiled ham. Taste before adding the salt to the eggs.
- The contradictory assemblyThe final line asks you to arrange the ham and the toast on a dish after you have already spread one on the other. Read it as: bring the ham toasts out of the oven, lay them on a warm platter, and pour the eggs over.
- Butter quantityTwo tablespoons of butter for six eggs is generous by modern habit but it is what keeps the curds soft. Use a heavy pan or a double boiler so the butter does not brown before the eggs go in.
- YieldSix eggs and four to six slices of toast serve three or four as a breakfast or light supper. Serve immediately — scrambled eggs held warm turn granular and release liquid onto the toast.
Oscar Tschirky was the Waldorf's maitre d'hotel from 1893 and his 1896 book records the hotel's repertoire alongside a good deal of straightforward American home cooking, which is where this belongs. Ham and eggs on toast is the plainest of the late-Victorian "savoury toasts" — a family that includes anchovy toast, sardine toast and Welsh rarebit — dishes built to be made quickly at the table in a chafing dish or on a back burner for breakfast, supper, or the after-theatre meal that New York hotels of the 1890s did a brisk trade in. Cold cooked ham was a standing item in any household or hotel larder that boiled a ham, and recipes like this one exist largely to use it up. The instruction not to let the eggs boil is a much-repeated rule in English-language egg cookery, appearing in print long before anyone could explain that heat makes egg proteins contract and squeeze out their water.