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Ham, Champagne Sauce
Procure three slices ham, sawn crosswise, of three-quarters of a pound each Trim off skin all around, slightly flatten them. Season with half teaspoon white pepper. Heat two tablespoons melted butter in a sauteuse, arrange in the slices of ham, one beside another, and nicely fry eight minutes on each side. Arrange on a hot dish. Remove fat from pan (save it for frying purposes). Pour a champagne sauce in same pan, mix well at bottom so as to retain flavour of the ham, and boil five minutes. Pour sauce over the ham and serve.
A Delmonico's-era treatment of ham steak, written for a kitchen that had a champagne sauce already standing on the stove. Two things need attention: the sauce is not given here, and the frying time assumes a slab far thicker than a supermarket ham steak.
- "Sawn crosswise"This means full cross-section slices cut through the bone from a whole cured ham, three-quarters of a pound each; depending on the width of the leg that is somewhere around an inch thick. A butcher will cut them; centre-cut bone-in ham steaks are the modern equivalent.
- SauteuseA sauté pan with sloping sides, wide enough to hold three slices side by side without overlapping. A 12-inch skillet works. Crowding steams the ham instead of browning it.
- Eight minutes a sideThat timing suits a thick slice of raw, salt-cured ham. Ordinary cured-and-cooked ham steaks are already fully cooked and only need colour: three to four minutes a side over medium-high heat, or they dry out and turn stringy. Uncured (green) ham of this thickness should reach 145F internally.
- No saltThe seasoning given is white pepper only. Cured ham brings its own salt, and the sauce reduction will concentrate whatever is in the pan.
- The champagne sauceIt is not given here; the reader is expected to look it up elsewhere in the book. Period champagne sauces are generally a reduction of dry champagne with aromatics, carried on a brown stock or demi-glace, sometimes finished with butter. Judge the quantity by what will coat three slices.
- The hingePour off the rendered fat but leave the browned residue, then add the sauce and scrape the bottom hard while it reduces. That fond is the whole point of cooking the sauce in the same pan rather than serving it from the saucepan.
- Five minutes' boilEnough to reduce and bind a stock-based sauce. If yours is finished with butter, keep it below a hard boil after the butter goes in or it will separate.
- Saved fatThe instruction to keep the ham fat for frying is standard thrift of the period. It keeps refrigerated for a few weeks and is good for eggs and potatoes.
- YieldThree slices of this size, about two and a quarter pounds bone-in, will serve six; the recipe itself gives no number.
Alexander Filippini spent decades in the kitchens of Delmonico's in New York, and his cookbooks carry that restaurant's French repertoire into American home use — hence a dish written as though a saucier were standing by with a pot of champagne sauce. Ham with a wine sauce is old and widespread: jambon au champagne belongs to the same family as the Burgundian ham braised in wine and the Alsatian ham in Riesling, all of them ways of cutting the salt of a cured leg with acid and sweetness. What marks this version as restaurant cooking rather than farmhouse cooking is the method — no long braise, just a quick fry and a sauce mounted in the pan, the sort of thing that can be fired to order. The instruction to save the rendered fat is a reminder that even a Delmonico's kitchen wasted nothing.