When a cooked ham is nearly all used up, take what remains, cut it all off from the bone, and stew the bits in a little water, till they are all to rags. You will find the essence an improvement to gravies, strained from the fragments.
MADEIRA HAM.—
This is a dish only seen at dinner parties. No one can believe, for a moment, that hams really cooked in Madeira wine are served up every week at hotels, particularly at those houses where there is no other superfluity, and where most of the great dishes exist only in the bill of fare. A genuine Madeira ham is cooked as follows:—Take a ham of the very finest sort; should be a Westphalia one. Lay it in hot water, and soak it all day and all night, changing the water several times, and every time washing out the pan. Early in the morning of the second day, put the ham into a large pot of cold water, and boil it slowly during four hours, skimming it well. Then take it out, remove the skin entirely, and put the ham into a clean boiler, with sufficient Madeira wine to cover it well. Boil, or rather stew it, an hour longer, keeping the pot covered except when you remove the lid to turn the ham. When well stewed take it up, drain it, and strain the liquor into a porcelain-lined saucepan. Have ready a sufficiency of powdered white sugar. Cover the ham all over with a thick coating of the sugar, and set it into a hot oven to bake for an hour.
Mix some orange or lemon-juice with the liquor adding plenty of sugar and nutmeg. Give it one boil up over the fire, and serve it up in a tureen, as sauce to the ham.
What is left of the ham may be cut next day into small pieces, put into a stew-pan, with the remains of the liquor or sauce poured over it, and stewed for a quarter of an hour or more. Serve it up all together in the same dish. While it is on the fire, add a little butter to the stew.
BROILED HAM.—
Ham for broiling or frying should be cut into thin slices the evening before, trimmed, and laid in a pan of boiling water, which, near bed-time, should be changed for cold water, and very early in the morning for boiling water, in which it should lie half an hour to soak still longer. If ham is not well soaked previously, it will, when broiled or fried, be disagreeably hard and salt; the salt frying out to the surface and forming a rough unpleasant crust, which will create thirst in the eaters for hours after. Much of the salt of a ham goes off in boiling, but if it is not boiled or soaked, the salt comes out to the surface and there it sticks. The slices being cut thin and nicely trimmed, they should be broiled on a very clean gridiron over a clear fire, and so well done that they incline to curl up at the edges. Dish them hot, and lay on every slice a very small bit of fresh butter, and sprinkle them with pepper.