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Baked Slice of Ham
Melt about 2 tablespoons of brown sugar in a frying pan, place a slice of ham about 1½ inch thick in the pan and brown it on both sides. Pour 1 cup of milk around it and bake in a slow oven 300°F. about 30 minutes. Remove the ham, thicken the gravy and serve.
A ham steak braised in milk, which is one of the older ways of handling a slab of cured pork: the milk tempers the salt and becomes the sauce. The main adjustment is the ham itself, which is a different product now than it was when this was written.
- The ham has changedThis recipe most likely assumes a slice cut from a whole cured ham, saltier than what is sold now and not necessarily pre-cooked. A supermarket ham steak today is wet-cured and usually sold fully cooked, so the oven time is mostly about warming it through and letting the milk reduce; check at 20 minutes.
- Thickness1½ inches is thicker than the packaged ham steaks now sold, which run ½ to ¾ inch. Ask a butcher for a center-cut slice at the full thickness, or use two thinner slices and shorten the baking.
- Slow ovenThe recipe helpfully gives the number: 300°F. Keep it there. Higher heat will make the milk break and scorch around the edges of the pan.
- The sugar is the hingeTwo tablespoons of brown sugar melted in a dry pan will burn in seconds over high heat, and burnt sugar will ruin the gravy. Use moderate heat, let it just liquefy, and lay the ham in as soon as it does.
- Oven-safe panThe whole dish moves from stovetop to oven in one vessel, so start in cast iron or another skillet that can go in the oven. Do not transfer to a baking dish; you want the browned sugar and pan drippings in the milk.
- Thickening the gravyNo proportion is given. About 1 tablespoon of flour per cup of liquid, worked into a little cold milk and stirred into the simmering pan juices, gives a light gravy. Taste before adding any salt at all.
- If the milk curdlesSalty cured pork and dairy will sometimes separate. It does not affect the flavor, and thickening with flour will usually pull it back together; a brief whisking off the heat helps.
- YieldA 1½-inch center slice weighs roughly 1½ to 2 pounds and serves four, with the gravy over potatoes or grits.
The Metropolitan Cook Book was not sold but given away: Metropolitan Life Insurance Company distributed it to policyholders over many years, part of a broader campaign in which insurers promoted nutrition and hygiene on the reasoning that healthier clients lived longer. That explains the register of a book like this one, which favors plain, economical, dependable cookery over anything showy. Baking a ham slice in milk belongs to the tradition of Southern and Midwestern farm kitchens where a cured ham hung all year and slices were cut from it as needed; the milk is often said to have been there for a practical reason, to draw out and soften the heavy salt of a country cure, and the browned sugar answered it from the other direction. The same logic runs through the milk-soaked ham slices found in nineteenth-century American cookbooks well before this one.