No. 2521

Ham Decorated a la Gatti

Jambon Decore a la Gatti

Have a ham prepared and cooked the same as for jelly (No. 2524); leave a part of the rind on the handle end, and cut it into sharp points by raising up the edge of each point on one side; glaze the ham with white chaudfroid (No. 596), all except the rind, which must be glazed with meat glaze (No. 402).

Decorate around the ham with a design of branches made of fillets of truffles and very green pistachios; decorate the top with a rosette of truffles. Place the ham on a silver dish, having two tiers covered with ravigote butter (No. 583); decorate around the dish bottom with halved eggs filled with chopped jelly, as shown in Fig. 498; surround the ham with chopped jelly, and the base with square jelly croutons (No. 2442). Insert a piece of wood to take the place of the handle, and trim it with a fancy frill (No. 10), and a hatelet on one side.

← No. 2520 Garnishing of Oysters with Jelly Garnishings for Cold Dishes No. 2522 Ham Glazed with Sugar →

For the Modern Kitchen

This is not a cooking recipe so much as a set of assembly and decoration instructions for a cold buffet centerpiece, and it assumes you have already read half a dozen other numbered entries in Ranhofer's book. The ham itself is cooked and cooled elsewhere; everything here happens on the cold side.

The hinge: everything must be cold and setWhite chaud-froid and aspic will only coat and hold on a thoroughly chilled ham, and the ham must be bone-dry on the surface or the coating slides. Chill the cooked ham overnight, glaze in thin successive coats, and return it to the refrigerator between coats.
White chaudfroid (No. 596)A velouté or béchamel-based sauce fortified with aspic stock so it sets to a firm ivory mask, applied at the point where it just begins to thicken. Modern versions often add cream and gelatin; if it is too warm it runs off, if too cool it goes lumpy.
Meat glaze (No. 402)Glace de viande: brown stock reduced to a syrup that sets solid and gives a dark mirror shine. A commercial demi-glace concentrate, further reduced, stands in acceptably for the rind glaze.
Ravigote butter (No. 583)Butter pounded with blanched green herbs, sometimes tinted, used here as an edible cement and coating rather than as a sauce. The recipe spreads it over the two tiers of the silver dish, the sort of raised staging grand cuisine used to lift a centerpiece above the platter.
Hatelet and frillA hatelet (hâtelet, or attelet) is a decorative silver skewer threaded with truffle and crayfish or similar and stuck in for height; it is ornament, not garnish to eat. The "handle" is the exposed bone end, and the wooden dowel plus paper frill is simply a tidier substitute for it.
Truffles and pistachiosFillets of truffle means truffle sliced thin and cut into strips for the branch design. Pistachios must be blanched and skinned to read as bright green; salted roasted nuts will not do.
Chopped jelly and croutonsSet a clear aspic firm in a shallow pan, then chop it coarsely for the mounded garnish and cut it into neat cubes for the base. Chopped jelly weeps if made ahead, so cut it as close to service as possible.
Time and temperature in practiceA whole decorated ham of this kind takes most of a day of glazing and chilling, and it is meant to stand on a cold buffet. Keep it refrigerated until service and do not let it sit out more than about two hours.
YieldThe recipe specifies no weight, but a whole bone-in ham dressed this way would serve a large table, on the order of two to three dozen as part of a cold buffet. It was never intended for a small table.

A Little History

The Epicurean (1894) is Charles Ranhofer's record of some thirty years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and this entry belongs to the section of purely visual work that justified the price of a banquet: cold ham masked in chaud-froid, drawn on with truffle, and raised on a tiered stand so the guests could see it down the length of the room. The style descends from the early nineteenth-century grande cuisine of Careme, in which cold pieces were treated as architecture; the name chaud-froid means literally "hot-cold," a sauce made hot and served cold, though the stories told about its origin are tradition rather than record. Suffixes like "a la Gatti" in this book often commemorate a patron, a colleague, or an occasion at the restaurant, but Ranhofer does not explain this one and the dedicatee is not documented in the text. What the recipe records most clearly is a kitchen with the labor to spare, for an effect that lasts until the first slice.