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Boiled and Baked Ham
Mrs. P. B. Ayer.
Boil your ham tender; cover it with the white of a raw egg, and sprinkle sugar or bread crumbs over it; put it in the oven and brown; it is delicious also covered with a regular cake icing and browned.
A two-stage ham: simmered until tender, then glazed and browned. The whole method hinges on the first stage being finished before the ham goes near the oven, since the browning takes only minutes and cooks nothing through.
- Know which ham you haveIn the 1870s this meant a dry-salt-cured, uncooked ham that genuinely needed hours of simmering. A supermarket "city ham" is already fully cooked and brine-cured; it needs only warming through, not boiling tender. A true dry-cured country ham needs 12 to 24 hours of soaking with changed water before simmering, or the finished dish will be inedibly salty.
- Boiling timesFor an uncooked cured ham, figure roughly 20 to 25 minutes per pound at a bare simmer, never a rolling boil, until the bone feels loose and an inserted skewer meets no resistance. Internal temperature should reach at least 145F; a ham taken to a loose bone will normally be well above that. Let it cool enough in its liquid to handle before you peel off the rind.
- Peel the rind, leave the fatThe recipe assumes you know to strip the skin while the ham is still warm, exposing the fat layer beneath. The egg white and crumbs have nothing to cling to on bare rind.
- The egg white is glue, not glazeBeaten lightly and brushed on, it sets and holds the sugar or crumbs in place. Use it thin; a thick coat of raw white puffs and slides.
- Oven heatThe original says only "put it in the oven and brown." Use 400 to 425F for 15 to 25 minutes, watching closely. Sugar on a warm ham darkens fast and turns bitter faster.
- "A regular cake icing"This means a plain boiled or royal-style icing of sugar and egg white, not modern buttercream, which would simply melt off. Applied thin and browned, it gives the lacquered crust that later cooks got from brown sugar and mustard.
- Scoring and studdingNot mentioned here, but the familiar diamond-cut fat and clove studding belongs to the same tradition and helps the coating hold. Score no deeper than the fat.
- YieldA bone-in half ham of 7 to 8 lb serves 12 to 16, with a good deal left over.
The Home Cook Book was compiled in Chicago in 1874 from recipes contributed by named local women, sold to raise money for the Home for the Friendless, and it is often said to be an early model for the American community cookbooks that followed, though charity cookbooks from the Civil War sanitary fairs and elsewhere precede it. Recipes like this one carry the contributor's name because that was the point: the book was a subscription list as much as a manual. The dish itself reflects the ham economy of a pre-refrigeration kitchen, where a whole cured leg was simmered and then dressed up for the table, cold and sliced, for days afterward. Glazing a boiled ham with sugar and egg white to form a browned crust was one contemporary approach; the suggestion of using "a regular cake icing" is the flourish of a cook who had seen it done and liked the look of it, and it sits at the edge of the Victorian taste for sweet-savory finishes that also gave us sugared hams studded with cloves.