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Ham, Mexicaine
Take three three-quarter-pound slices ham, trim well all around, heat a tablespoon butter in a frying pan, add the slices, one beside another, and fry for eight minutes on each side. Remove and keep hot. Finely mince two green peppers and two Spanish sweet peppers; add to the pan and brown for five minutes. Drain the fat from the pan, then add one gill tomato sauce and half teaspoon freshly chopped parsley; cook for five minutes, occasionally mixing meanwhile. Dress, dome-shape, a sweet potato puree on a hot dish, arrange the ham over the potatoes, pour the sauce and garnishing over all and serve.
A ham steak with a pepper-tomato sauce over sweet potato purée. The main adjustment is time: the ham of this recipe was raw or lightly cured and needed real cooking, while nearly every ham steak sold today is fully cooked.
- The hinge: cooking timeEight minutes a side will dry out a modern pre-cooked ham steak into leather. Sear a supermarket ham steak two to three minutes a side, just to colour and heat through, and let the pan juices carry into the sauce.
- "Three three-quarter-pound slices"Three slices weighing three-quarters of a pound each, roughly 2.25 lb of ham in total. The recipe gives no thickness; a slice of that weight will be a substantial steak, making three generous portions or six modest ones.
- A gill4 fl oz, half a cup, in American measure (a British gill is 5 fl oz). The tomato sauce meant here is a plain cooked tomato sauce, not ketchup and not a herbed pasta sauce.
- Spanish sweet peppersPimientos, often sold canned or bottled at the time. Jarred piquillo or pimiento peppers, drained and minced, are the direct substitute; the green peppers are ordinary bell peppers.
- The sweet potato puréeNo recipe is given. Boil or bake about 2 lb sweet potatoes, mash with 2 tablespoons butter and salt, and keep it stiff enough to hold the dome shape the recipe asks for.
- Draining the fatPour off the fat but leave the browned bits and the peppers in the pan. That fond is where the sauce gets its flavour, since the sauce itself is only tomato and parsley.
- SeasoningNo salt is specified, on the assumption that the ham supplies it. Taste the sauce before it goes over the dish; cured ham varies enormously in saltiness.
The name follows the French kitchen's habit of labelling anything with sweet peppers and tomato "à la mexicaine" — a shorthand of the grand-hotel repertoire rather than a claim of Mexican origin, in the same family as "à la portugaise" for tomato or "à la milanaise" for macaroni. The International Cook Book belongs to that tradition, compiled by a Delmonico's chef for cooks who worked from a standard vocabulary of garnishes. What is genuinely American here is the pairing of ham with sweet potato, a combination often said to be Southern in origin, dressed up with a French service instruction to mound the purée dome-shape on a hot dish.