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Ham Braise, Josselyn
Soak a four-pound piece of ham in cold water for six hours. Remove and place it in an earthen pot, adding one sliced carrot, one sliced onion, a bean garlic, one branch parsley, a branch chervil, a small branch tarragon, a sprig thyme, a sprig marjoram, one bay leaf, one clove, half teaspoon salt, half teaspoon pepper, half teaspoon curry powder, a pint cider, a gill claret, quarter gill sherry, two tablespoons vinegar and one calf's foot cut in pieces. Mix well, cover the pot and let marinade in a cool place for six hours. Then place pot in a moderate oven for two and a half hours, basting it once in a while. Take up the ham, neatly trim, dress on a large hot dish and keep hot. Knead in a saucepan a half ounce butter with one ounce flour, then add it little by little to the sauce in the pot, mix well and boil for two minutes, gently mixing once in a while. Pick off the stems from a pound of white California grapes, place them in a frying pan with tablespoon melted butter, and briskly fry until a nice golden colour, tossing them meanwhile. Arrange them around the ham. Strain a third of the sauce through a Chinese strainer over the ham, the rest into a saucebowl, and serve.
A French-style braised ham dressed with fried grapes, written when hams were salt-cured, hard and genuinely needed a long soak. The ham you buy today almost certainly does not, and that single change reshapes the whole recipe.
- Start with the right hamThe six-hour soak exists to draw salt from a dry-cured country ham. A modern wet-cured, ready-to-eat supermarket ham is already mild and does not need soaking; soaking it only waterlogs the meat. If you are working with a true dry-cured country ham, the soak stands.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives no figures; a moderate oven is usually reckoned at around 325-350F. Covered, with the liquid in the pot, two and a half hours suits a four-pound piece; a fully cooked ham needs only to be heated through to about 140F, while a raw cured ham should reach 145F at the centre.
- Gills and other measuresA gill is half a cup, so a gill of claret is 4 fl oz and a quarter gill of sherry is 2 tablespoons. A pint of cider is 16 fl oz. In a braise of this kind the cider is most likely hard cider, though the word was also used at the time for the sweet unfermented drink.
- A bean of garlicOne clove, peeled. The phrasing is a period idiom for a garlic clove, often explained as a literal rendering of the French gousse d'ail.
- The calf's footIt contributes gelatin, which is what gives the finished sauce its gloss and body. A split veal foot or a pig's trotter from a butcher does the same job; failing that, dissolve a couple of teaspoons of powdered gelatin into the finished sauce, though the result is thinner in flavour.
- Earthen potA lidded stoneware or enamelled cast-iron braiser of five or six quarts. It needs to be oven-safe and to seal reasonably well, since almost all the liquid the ham gets is what goes in at the start.
- Thickening the sauceKneading butter and flour together cold is beurre manié. Whisk it into the hot braising liquid in small pieces off the boil, then bring it up for two minutes only — longer and the sauce dulls and the wine flavour flattens.
- The grapesWhite California grapes of this date could have been Malaga, Muscat or Thompson Seedless; seedless Thompson grapes are the easy modern stand-in. Fry them hot and fast, no more than a minute or two, or they collapse into skins.
- Chinese strainerA chinois — a conical fine-mesh strainer. Any fine sieve will do; the point is to catch the vegetables, bones and herb stems and leave a clear sauce.
- YieldFour pounds of ham on the bone serves eight generously, six with second helpings, and the sauce bowl will empty first.
Alexander Filippini's International Cook Book (1906) runs to thousands of entries, and a great many of them carry a surname the way this one does — a habit picked up from the Delmonico's kitchens where he spent his career, where dishes were routinely named for patrons, colleagues or the occasion that prompted them. The technique underneath the name is straightforwardly French: a cured ham braised in wine and cider with an aromatic garnish and a calf's foot for body, the same method that produces jambon braise au madere and its many cousins. The fried grapes are the flourish, and they place the dish in the wider family of savoury preparations finished with white grapes. That the grapes are specified as Californian is itself a small marker of the date: by the turn of the century the transcontinental railroads and refrigerated cars had made West Coast table grapes an ordinary sight in New York markets, and a cookbook aimed at professional kitchens could assume them.