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Delicious Fried Ham
Place the slices in boiling water and cook till tender; put in frying-pan and brown, and dish on a platter; fry some eggs by dripping gravy over them until done, instead of turning; take up carefully and lay them on the slices of ham. -Mrs. J. F. W
Two techniques in four lines: boiling the ham before frying, and basting eggs in fat rather than flipping them. Both are worth keeping, but only the first needs explanation.
- What kind of ham this isThe instruction to boil the slices until tender only makes sense for thick-cut dry-cured country ham, which is hard, dense and very salty. Modern wet-cured supermarket ham steak is already tender and mild; it needs no boiling at all and will turn watery and stringy if you do it.
- The boiling step is about saltSimmering draws out a good deal of the cure along with softening the meat. For a half-inch country ham slice, 15-25 minutes at a bare simmer is usually enough; discard the water, as it is too salty to use as stock. Pat the slice thoroughly dry before it goes in the pan or it will steam instead of browning.
- BrowningA hot dry pan is enough for country ham, which renders its own fat. Two to three minutes a side gives colour; longer dries it out, since the meat is already cooked through from the simmer.
- "Dripping gravy over them"This is basting, not gravy in the thickened sense. It means spooning the hot ham fat in the pan over the eggs until the whites set and a film clouds the yolk. The result is what a diner now calls basted eggs; the yolk stays soft, so use eggs you are willing to eat lightly cooked.
- Fat in the panCountry ham may not render enough to baste with. Add a spoonful of butter or bacon fat and tip the pan so it pools, or the whites will set before you can spoon anything over them.
- SeasoningDo not salt the eggs before tasting. Even after parboiling, the ham and its rendered fat carry plenty, and the basting fat seasons the eggs directly.
- YieldAs written this serves as many as you have slices; figure one slice and one or two eggs per person, with biscuits or grits alongside.
Ham and eggs was a familiar Southern breakfast plate of the late nineteenth century, and the parboiling step here marks the ham as home-cured from a farm smokehouse rather than anything bought sliced. Dry-cured hams of that period were salted hard and hung for months, and cooks routinely soaked or simmered them to make them edible at all; recipe books of the era give the same treatment before frying or baking. Basting suited a kitchen working over a wood range, where the pan sits in one place and a spatula flip risks breaking the yolk while spooning fat costs nothing. Attributions of the form "Mrs. J. F. W." were common in the community cookbooks of the period, assembled from contributions by Southern housewives and reading as collections of household practice.