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Ham Sauce
After a ham is nearly all used up pick the small quantity of meat still remaining clean from the bone, scrape away the uneatable parts and trim off any rusty bits from the meat, chop the bone very small, and beat the meat almost to a paste. Put the broken bones and the meat together into a saucepan over a slow fire, pour over them one-fourth pint of broth and stir for about a quarter of an hour; add to it a few sweet herbs, a seasoning of pepper and one-half pint of good beef stock. Cover the saucepan and stir very gently till well flavored with the herbs, then strain it. A little of this added to any gravy is an improvement.
A thrift preparation: the last scraps and bone of a ham turned into a concentrated flavoring for gravies. It behaves like a small ham stock, and the quantities are modest enough that it is worth making whenever a ham is finished.
- The measuresIn American measure a pint is 16 fl oz, so one-fourth pint is 1/2 cup of broth and one-half pint is 1 cup of beef stock. Total liquid is about 1 1/2 cups, yielding roughly 1 cup of strained sauce base.
- Salt is the hingeCured ham and its bone carry a great deal of salt, and the original adds none by design — only pepper and herbs. Use unsalted or low-sodium stock, and taste before any of it goes into a finished gravy.
- "A slow fire"Low heat, well below a simmer for the first stage. The point of the initial quarter hour is to melt the meat paste into the broth without letting it catch on the pan bottom, which scorches quickly because the mixture is thick.
- Sweet herbsThe period term for the mild kitchen herbs: thyme, parsley stalks, marjoram, a bay leaf. Not sweet in the sugar sense. A small tied bundle is easier to fish out than loose leaves, though the sauce is strained anyway.
- Chopping the boneA ham bone is dense; use a heavy cleaver on a board you do not mind marking, or ask a butcher to saw it. Do not attempt it in a food processor. If fine chopping is impractical, cracking the bone into two or three pieces will still give some gelatin and flavour, though less than the recipe's fine chop over so short a cooking time.
- Beating the meatThe instruction to beat the scraps almost to a paste is about surface area, not texture in the finished sauce. A few pulses in a processor does the same work in seconds.
- Trimming"Rusty bits" is the period term for the discoloured, rancid-tasting parts of a cut ham that has sat about, usually the yellowed or grey-brown fat and surface. Cut it away; the taint will carry through the whole batch.
- Finishing and keepingChill the strained liquid and lift off the set fat before use. It keeps three or four days refrigerated, or freeze it in ice-cube trays and drop a cube into pan gravies, split pea soup or braising liquid.
This is a kitchen-economy recipe of a kind that fills nineteenth-century household manuals: nothing edible leaves the house, and the ham bone earns its keep twice. Oscar Tschirky's 1896 volume was compiled while he was maître d'hôtel at the Waldorf, and alongside the à la carte showpieces it carries a good deal of this plainer material, much of which reads as English and American domestic cooking rather than hotel invention. A concentrate of this sort stood in for the long-simmered stockpot that a hotel brigade kept going and a home cook did not. The advice at the end, that a little added to any gravy is an improvement, is the whole point of the entry: it is not a dish but a seasoning held in reserve.