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Ham Cakes
Mix a few spoonfuls of cooked ham chopped fine with two cups well-seasoned mashed potatoes.
Brown in a little hot bacon fat.
Two lines of instruction assume a cook who already knows what a potato cake looks like. The details worth pinning down are the ratio, the binding, and the heat of the pan.
- "A few spoonfuls"Read this as roughly a quarter to a half cup of finely chopped ham to the two cups of mashed potato. Much more and the cakes lose the starch that holds them together; much less and they taste only of potato.
- Cold mash works betterLeftover mashed potato straight from the refrigerator is stiff and shapes cleanly. A loose, freshly made mash will be hard to form into a patty until it has cooled and firmed.
- BindingThe original relies on the potato alone. If the mash was made with a lot of milk or cream, one beaten egg per two cups will keep the cakes from breaking when turned.
- Well-seasonedThe instruction is doing real work here. Cured ham brings the salt, so season for pepper, a little mustard or a scrape of nutmeg, and taste before adding any more salt.
- "Brown in a little hot bacon fat"Medium-high heat in a heavy skillet, about a tablespoon of fat, and no crowding. Roughly 4 minutes a side, and leave them alone until a crust has set or they will tear.
- Bacon fatRendered bacon drippings were commonly saved for cooking in kitchens of this kind rather than thrown out. Any neutral oil or clarified butter substitutes, though the smoky note goes with it.
- YieldTwo cups of mash makes six small cakes or four generous ones, enough for two people with an egg on top for breakfast or supper.
Books of this kind belong to a small but steady genre of English and American household writing on the reuse of cooked food, aimed at kitchens where a boiled or baked ham was a large investment eaten down over many days. Ham cakes sit in the same family as fish cakes, hash and the British bubble and squeak: cold mashed potato as a carrier for a small quantity of expensive protein, made appetizing by a browned crust. The reliance on bacon fat is a period marker in itself, from an era when the rendered drippings from breakfast were saved as a matter of course rather than discarded, and when a cook could be trusted to know exactly how hot a skillet should be without being told a number.