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Sliced Ham, Saute
Cut out from a ham six thin slices and trim the skin off nicely. Heat a tablespoon butter in a frying pan, add the slices, one beside another, and briskly fry for one and a half minutes on each side. Remove, place on a hot dish and serve.
A three-line recipe that depends entirely on the ham and the heat. The only real technique here is not overcooking it.
- The hinge: keep it briefNinety seconds a side is not an error — sliced cured ham is already edible, and the pan is there to brown it and warm it through. Left longer it dries out and curls into leather.
- What kind of hamThe recipe assumes a whole ham with the skin still on, from which slices are cut. Buy a thick-cut slice of fully cooked bone-in ham, or a country ham steak. Fresh (uncured) pork leg is a different thing entirely and needs to be cooked through, not flashed in butter.
- Thickness"Thin" here means about 1/8 to 1/4 inch. Deli-thin slices will overcook before they colour; anything over half an inch wants a lower heat and several minutes a side.
- TrimmingTrim the rind, but leave a rim of fat — it renders and does most of the work. Nick the fat edge in two or three places so the slice lies flat instead of buckling.
- The panA tablespoon of butter in a wide frying pan, hot but not smoking. Butter browns fast at the temperature this needs; clarified butter, or butter with a little neutral oil, gives you more margin. Cook in batches rather than crowding six slices into one pan.
- Don't waste the panThe original stops at the hot dish, but the salty brown residue left behind is the point of frying in butter. A splash of water, cider, madeira or coffee, swirled and poured over, turns this into the red-eye and cream-gravy family of ham dishes.
- Yield and servingSix thin slices serves three as a main course with potatoes, or six at breakfast. Salt levels vary wildly between hams, so taste before seasoning anything served alongside.
Sautéed ham slices appear in general cookbooks of the era for a practical reason: a cured ham was a standing household resource, hung whole and cut into as needed, and a recipe like this is really an instruction for using it up. The word sauté — French for "jumped" — signals only that the meat is cooked quickly in a little fat in an open pan, as opposed to the long boiling or baking a whole ham demanded. The same pan of ham drippings is closely related to red-eye gravy in the American South and to the cream gravies served with ham steak.