French Provincial Cooking - Elizabeth David [135]
First of all chop the shallots very finely and put them with the juniper berries in a small saucepan with the vinegar. Bring to the boil and cook until the vinegar has all but dried up and only the shallots are left.
In another saucepan melt the butter, stir in the flour, continue stirring until the mixture is quite smooth and turns pale coffee colour; pour in the heated stock, rather gradually. Keep on stirring until the mixture thickens; add the white wine and then the shallot mixture; cook gently for some time longer, about half an hour, until all taste of flour has disappeared, and removing any scum which comes to the surface; then sieve the sauce. Return it to a clean pan, reheat it, taste for seasoning, stir in the bubbling cream and a small lump of butter. Keep the sauce hot in a bain-marie until it is wanted. It should be a beautiful pale coffee-cream colour, smooth, but not very thick.
Have ready 2 or 3 large slices of uncooked ham or gammon weighing about 6 oz. each, steeped in water for half an hour or so. Fry them gently in butter on both sides; transfer to the serving dish; pour your hot sauce over them. Enough for three.
I also quite often make this dish with about lb. of cold cooked ham or gammon cut into thinnish slices. Instead of frying them, simply arrange them, overlapping, in a big shallow baking dish, pour the hot sauce over, and heat very gently, uncovered, in the oven, for 10 to 15 minutes.
JAMBON À LA CRÈME
HAM WITH CREAM SAUCE
This is another version of the foregoing dish, a whole boiled ham served hot with the same piquant cream sauce. It is usually made with a ham from the Morvan, a district of Burgundy where the mild cured hams have a great reputation. The dish is in fact often called jambon à la morvandelle.
However, it is not often nowadays that one wants to cook a whole ham to serve hot for it is rather extravagant in the carving and since, in England, uncooked hams are usually only sold whole, the same dish can be made with a piece of gammon.
It should perhaps be explained that whereas a ham proper is cut from the pig as soon as it is killed and the salting, curing and maturing carried out slowly over a period of several weeks, or even months, a gammon is a leg ham quick-cured by the bacon method on the whole side of the pig. The texture and flavour of a gammon, which may be smoked or unsmoked, is therefore somewhat different from that of a ham, but a whole leg of gammon or a piece of one is cooked in very much the same way. So although there is not, so far as I know, any precise equivalent of our gammon produced by French pork curers, I see no reason why we should not adapt some of the French recipes for ham to this excellent and relatively cheap product of our own.
In recent years we have taken to the American system of serving pineapple, peaches, apples and oranges with our hams and gammons. The Burgundian cream sauce makes a welcome change.
Now here is the method of cooking the gammon. It could hardly be simpler.
Buy a piece of middle gammon, which is the easiest to carve, weighing 4 to 4 lb. Soak it in cold water, changed at least once, for 12 to 24 hours. To cook it, cover it completely with fresh cold water, and bring it very, very slowly to a bare simmering point. Calculate half an hour to the pound from the time you put it on to cook, and throughout the whole process keep the water just murmuring, not boiling. If you are going to use this water for soup stock add carrots, onions and a bouquet of herbs.
Start off the cooking in sufficient time before dinner to allow you to leave the gammon in its pan of water for about 20 minutes after cooking time is finished. This slight cooling will give the joint time to get a little firmer and make it much easier both to skin and to carve.
In the meantime, while the gammon was cooking you will have made your sauce, as in the foregoing recipe, but in double quantities to serve, say, six to eight people.
Take the gammon