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Ham Saute with Red Peppers
Cut from a raw ham, crosswise, three slices of ten ounces each and neatly trim off skin all around. Heat thoroughly two tablespoons oil in a sautoir, arrange slice in pan one beside another, cook for eight minutes on each side, lift up and dress on a dish.
Split six Spanish red peppers in halves, place them in the sautoir and fry for two minutes on each side, remove and place on top of the ham. Remove oil from pan, pour into it half a gill water, a gill tomato sauce, two tablespoons sherry and half teaspoon chopped parsley. Mix well at the bottom to detach ham glaze, let reduce to half the quantity, then pour it over ham and serve.
A hotel-kitchen recipe written in shorthand: three thick pork steaks, peppers fried in the same fat, and a fast pan sauce built on the fond. The whole thing takes about twenty-five minutes once the pan is hot.
- "Raw ham" means fresh pork legThis is uncured meat — what a butcher today sells as fresh ham or pork leg steak, not prosciutto or a cured deli ham. If you use anything cured, the sauce reduction will turn punishingly salty.
- Slice thicknessTen ounces cut crosswise from a leg gives a steak roughly three-quarters of an inch to an inch thick. That thickness is what makes eight minutes a side plausible; thinner supermarket cuts will be dry well before then. Cook to 145F at the centre and rest a few minutes.
- SautoirA straight-sided shallow pan with a flat bottom — a modern sauté pan or a wide skillet. It needs to be large enough to hold three big slices without overlapping, or brown them in two batches.
- GillsA gill is half a cup, so half a gill of water is 1/4 cup and a gill of tomato sauce is 1/2 cup. Reduced by half, that yields only about half a cup of finished sauce for three portions — a glaze rather than a gravy.
- Spanish red peppersMost likely sweet pimiento-type peppers, thick-fleshed and mild rather than chillies, though the recipe does not specify. Fresh red bell peppers halved and seeded work; two minutes a side in oil will soften but not fully cook them, so cut them into narrower strips if you want them tender.
- Tomato sauceIn a book of this vintage this means a cooked, seasoned tomato sauce of the classical kind, not canned plain purée and not a jarred pasta sauce. A thick passata with a little stock stirred in is the closest quick substitute.
- Pour off the oil, keep the fondThe instruction to remove the oil and then "mix well at the bottom to detach ham glaze" is the point of the dish. Discard the fat but leave every browned scrap; the sherry and water lift it, and that is where the flavour comes from.
- YieldThree slices, three servings, with the peppers and a spoonful of sauce over each.
The International Cook Book is the work of Alexander Filippini, long associated with Delmonico's in New York, and the writing shows it: quantities in gills, pans named by their professional shapes, and instructions that assume a cook already knows what a reduction should look like. The dish itself is a straightforward continental saut ed — meat browned, garnish fried in the same fat, pan deglazed with wine and a spoon of tomato sauce — dressed up as "international" by the Spanish peppers and the sherry. Those thick-fleshed sweet peppers, generally traced to Spanish cultivation and canned for export by the turn of the twentieth century, were exactly the sort of imported convenience that let an American hotel kitchen put a national label on a plate. Fresh ham, meanwhile, was ordinary butchery in 1906, when a whole leg might be cut for steaks rather than cured whole.