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Ham, Bourguignonne
Trim a nice piece ham of three pounds, place in a saucepan and cover with cold water, then let come to a boil, remove pan to a table and let stand one hour. Take up ham and place in a braising pan with a sliced carrot, a sliced onion, one leek, one bean crushed garlic, two branches parsley, one branch chervil, a sprig thyme, one sprig marjoram, one bay leaf, two cloves and a teaspoon allspice. Moisten with a half pint claret and a pint white broth, season with a half teaspoon salt and half teaspoon white pepper, cover pan, let boil twenty-five minutes, and set in oven two hours, remove, dress ham on a hot dish and keep hot. Pour one and a half gills demi-glace and a half gill tomato sauce into the gravy, briskly boil twenty minutes, then strain sauce through a Chinese strainer over ham and serve.
A classic braised ham in red wine, written in professional shorthand for a kitchen that already had stock and sauces on the stove. Two things need translating before you start: what kind of ham the author meant, and what the sauce is built from.
- The ham matters mostThis reads as an uncooked cured ham, most likely a country style, which would explain the blanching: covering with cold water, bringing to a boil and letting it stand an hour draws out salt and firms the meat. A modern supermarket ham is already brined and usually fully cooked; blanching it does nothing useful and two hours of braising will dry it out. Use an uncooked country or raw-cured ham, or shorten the oven time considerably.
- "One bean crushed garlic"A bean-sized piece of garlic, roughly one clove.
- Gills and pintsA gill is half a cup. One and a half gills of demi-glace is three-quarters of a cup; half a gill of tomato sauce is a quarter cup. Half a pint of claret is one cup, and a pint of white broth is two cups.
- Claret and white brothClaret is dry red Bordeaux; any dry, unoaked red will do. "White broth" is a pale, unroasted veal or chicken stock — not a brown stock, which would overwhelm the wine.
- Demi-glaceEspagnole reduced with brown stock, a staple of professional kitchens of the period and rare in home kitchens now. A well-reduced brown veal or beef stock, or a good commercial demi-glace, stands in. Without it the finished sauce will be thin.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A braise of this kind wants a moderate oven, roughly 300-325F, covered, so the liquid barely trembles. Check that the pan has not gone dry after the first hour.
- Chinese strainerA chinois — the conical fine-mesh strainer. A regular fine sieve works; press the aromatics gently rather than forcing them through, or the sauce will cloud.
- The final reductionTwenty minutes of brisk boiling after the demi-glace goes in is what turns braising liquid into sauce. Skim the fat that rises before straining, or the sauce will break on the plate.
- YieldThree pounds of ham serves six to eight as a main course, with about a cup of finished sauce.
"Bourguignonne" means in the manner of Burgundy, and in classical French cookery it signals red wine — the same logic that gives us boeuf bourguignon, oeufs en meurette and any number of red-wine braises from the region. Applying it to ham is less familiar to modern eyes than applying it to beef, but the method here follows the classical pattern exactly: blanch to draw the salt, braise on a bed of aromatic vegetables and herbs, then build the sauce from the strained braising liquid with demi-glace. The assumption that a cook has demi-glace and tomato sauce already made places this squarely in the professional tradition, where a recipe needed only to say how much to ladle out.