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Pan Broiled Ham
Into a medium-sized frying pan measure one-half tablespoon Karo. Heat this, put in the ham and turn at once, then cook more slowly without adding any fat. The Karo adds a most distinctive flavor.
A two-line method that depends entirely on heat control: the sugar in the syrup is there to caramelize on the surface of the ham, and it will scorch if the pan is too hot for too long.
- Karo is corn syrupKaro was and is a brand of corn syrup; the recipe does not say which variety, though the light (clear) syrup would suit. Half a tablespoon is little more than a film on the bottom of a medium frying pan.
- The turn at once mattersThe ham goes into a hot pan, gets flipped immediately so both faces pick up syrup and colour, and then the heat comes down. Leaving it on high after the initial sear burns the sugar and makes the pan bitter.
- No added fat, on purposeA ham slice renders enough of its own fat within a minute or two. Adding butter or bacon grease dilutes the syrup and stops it setting into a glaze.
- What cut to buyThis most likely means a slice of cured ham somewhere around a quarter to a half inch thick, bone in or out. Supermarket ham steaks are usually fully cooked and wet-cured, in which case they need only be heated through and browned, roughly two to three minutes a side over medium heat.
- Dry the surface firstModern wet-cured ham carries a lot of moisture. Blot the slice with paper towel or the syrup will thin out and the ham will steam rather than colour.
- Slash the fat edgeCutting through the rim of fat at intervals keeps the slice from curling away from the pan, which is the usual reason one side browns unevenly.
- YieldOne slice of the size described serves one or two at breakfast. The pan does not want crowding; cook slices one at a time and hold them in a low oven.
Karo appeared on American grocery shelves in the early 1900s, and its makers were among the publishers of promotional cookery booklets of the period, of which this book appears to be one: the syrup turns up in places where a cook of the previous generation would have reached for brown sugar or molasses. Glazing ham with something sweet is much older than the brand, of course, since cured pork was heavily salted and a sugar counterweight is often said to have been common on both sides of the Atlantic. What is distinctly of its moment here is the confidence that a refined, neutral, mass-produced syrup is an improvement on the farmhouse alternatives, and that half a tablespoon of it constitutes a "distinctive flavor" worth naming. Pan-broiling itself, meaning cooking in a hot dry pan with no added fat, was a standard term in American cookery instruction of the era and appears in domestic-science teaching of the day.