Christmas Breakfast Menu from the Late 1800s/Early 1900s

I'm currently putting together our Christmas Day menus and procuring the needed foods. This morning I headed over to Fred Meyer and took advantage of the 97 cent/lb half-ham deal. So I know I have a ham I can work with for brunch and/or dinner.

While poking around on the Internet Archive site (archive.org) the other day, looking for Christmas menus from times past, I came across a gem of a cookbook from over 100 years ago, The White House Cook Book; A Comprehensive Cyclopedia of Information for the Home, by Hugo Ziemann and  Mrs. F. L. Gillette.  The original copyright was from 1887. The publication date from the edition on archive.org was 1913.

This cookbook was written for the general public as both a practical guide to cookery/housewifery and a source of interesting information about White House hospitality during the later 1800s. There are menus for everyday meals, holiday celebrations, and also state occasions. There’s a menu for Gen. Grant’s birthday dinner, Mrs. Cleveland’s Wedding Lunch, and a menu for a 1,000-guest buffet. On the practical side, there are suggestions for teething children, making poultices, and a cure for ringworm.

Would you like to know how to seat 50 people around the table?  Here's what the layout would have looked like at a White House state dinner.

There was in fact a page of Christmas menus.

Here's the Christmas Day Breakfast Menu (found on page 500):

Oranges

Boiled Rice

Broiled Salt Mackerel

Poached Eggs à la Crème  (poached eggs smothered in a warm thin white sauce)

Potato Fillets (sounds a lot like French fries, sliced into 1/4-inch sticks, fried twice, until puffed)

Feather Griddle Cakes  (yeast leavened pancakes)

Wheat Bread

Coffee

My family would probably skip the mackerel and maybe the boiled rice. The pancakes, eggs, potatoes, coffee, and oranges sound nice. Although it sounds to me like a lot of work on Christmas morning. I think I'll keep working on our Christmas day brunch menu.

How about you? Have you begun planning your holiday meals for later this month?

Holiday Tip #2

Well what do you know? The holiday tip list is longer than one item. Ha ha.

Here's the tip:

If you'll be baking a ham for Christmas or New Year's, don't forget that you can use all parts of that ham. This particularly applies to bone-in hams. 

image:https://www.simplyrecipes.com/recipes/glazed_baked_ham/

Four parts of a bone-in ham to make sure you use

1-Obviously, all of the meat is useful as is.

2-Liquid drippings from baking. Drippings are a combination of caramelized meat juices and liquified fat. This liquid makes a delicious gravy, even if you don't plan on using the gravy with the meal for which you baked the ham. The gravy would be wonderful on biscuits or mashed potatoes another day. Like other parts of the ham, the drippings can be frozen until needed.

3-Ham bones make delicious, flavorful stock. I like to oven-roast the bone after just about all of the meat has been picked off of it.  I place the bone on a baking sheet with raised edges and roast at about 375 degrees F for 20 minutes. Then I place the bone into water and simmer for several hours. The baking sheet may have some fat on it from roasting the bone. I pour that off into a container and save it in the fridge to use in cooking. Once the bone has simmered in the water for a few hours, I remove it from the heat, cool and pick the remaining meat off to use in soup, pouring the stock into freezer containers. 

Most folks dispose of the bone at this point. However, there is such a thing as "second stock," where the now-spent bone is simmered with vegetables and herbs in fresh water, extracting the last bits of flavor and nutrients (such as collagen). Second stock can be used as liquid in soups and stews, or as cooking liquid for vegetable dishes (where ever you might splash a bit of water). Second stock can also be used to dilute and stretch a first-run batch of stock when making soup.

Ham stock is really great in split pea and navy bean soups, as well as to make a nice binding sauce for casseroles when combined with some milk, flour, and seasonings. If you can't make the stock the same week that you bake the ham, wrap the bone in foil and/or plastic and toss it in the freezer to do later.

4-And finally, all of the fat on the ham can be rendered to be used in cooking later. I store our rendered ham fat in the freezer and chop off a bit as needed when cooking. 

To render the fat from a ham, dice the ham fat into 1/4-inch dices. It doesn't matter if there's a little bit of meat on the fat. Dice it all. In a heavy-bottomed pot, heat the fat dices over low, stirring occasionally. The fat will liquify slowly. When the fat is just about all rendered, you will have both liquid fat and small, dark and crispy bits, known as the cracklings. Cracklings are tasty for topping bowls of soup, fresh salads, added to cornbread or biscuit dough, or topping creamy pasta dishes, adding flavor much like bacon bits. Any cracklings that I'm not using right away I store in the freezer. Also, if you don't think you'll get to rendering ham fat in a timely manner, you can cut off and freeze the pieces of fat until a day that you do have time for rendering. 

We use ham fat for sautéing veggies, cooking egg dishes, and pan or oven-frying. If the ham fat seems to have too over-powering of a taste for a particular dish, I dilute it with part vegetable oil for that dish.

Years ago I posted about rendering ham fat for use in cooking later. See this post. I get many clicks on this post during the holiday season from Thanksgiving through New Years. So I thought some of you might also be interested in these how-to's.

I feel that using as much of a meat product as possible not only saves some money, but it's also a respectful thing to do for the animal used for cooking, and it spares other foods in the chain for the global population. *stepping off my soap box now*

I was at WinCo this morning. Their hams are priced at $1.89 for a butt portion bone-in ham. Fred Meyer has bone-in hams on sale this week for 97 cents/ lb with a $25 purchase. If I can think of $25 worth of food or household goods to buy at Fred Meyer, that may be the way to go. Will you be baking a ham this holiday season?