Baked Ham And Noodles: It's too good to care that it's not pretty

I didn't know I had leftover ham.

Baked Ham With Noodles 1 cup leftover ham, chopped into medium pieces 3 cups leftover cooked noodles 1 cup whole milk ½ cup breadcrumbs Salt and pepper to taste 1 tbsp butter Heat oven to 400°. Grease a medium-sized baking dish. Sprinkle the noodles in ham into the dish in alternate layers. Season with salt and pepper. Add less salt than you may think- the ham already contains plenty of it. Pour the milk over everything in the pan. Then sprinkle it with bread crumbs. Dot with the butter. Bake until browned, about 15-20 minutes. Source: Mrs. Mary Martensen's Century of Progress Cook Book (recipes from The Chicago American), 1933, via The Internet Archive

Over the course of cleaning out the freezer, I found a gallon bag of leftover ham from Thanksgiving. When I put it away in November, I told myself that I'd make something truly special with it, since ham doesn't happen every day. Then, when no worthy recipe appeared, I forgot the ham was in the freezer until it landed on my foot. 

Yes, you can buy sliced ham with the other cold cuts, but it's not the same.

And so, instead of obsessing over the perfect way to elevate this rare treat into something truly grand, we're going to let Mrs. Mary Martensen help us do something more interesting than just microwaving it or putting it in rice. I think this recipe is supposed to let us quickly repurpose our leftovers. If I'd had leftover noodles on hand, I could have gotten this oven in three minutes. 

This was a lot better than it should have been.

I thought one cup of ham seemed awfully parsimonious, so I decided that this is one of those "measure with your heart" recipes. And my heart said we should add one heaping cup of ham. But when I got everything into the pan, I started to think that we might have a bit too much meat to too little noodles. (Who would have thought that a recipe writer would be more correct than someone following along at home?) This is what we had after returning to level measurements.

 

You usually make a white sauce in recipes like this, not pour in the milk to make a sloshy mess. I was a little worried that I'd end up with a pan of mush. But I am not Mrs. Mary Martensen, director of a newspaper's home economics department, who presumably made sure these recipes worked before they went to press. 

When we took the pan out of the oven, we found a surprisingly good baked macaroni. The milk had kept the noodles from drying without turning them soggy. But I should note that it left weird, proteinaceous, and occasionally stringy deposits as it slowly boiled away.

The noodles lifted out perfectly without sticking or leaving any sad goop in the pan. I'm not saying Mrs. Mary Martensen was like Mrs. Wilson of the Philadelphia Evening Public Ledger who could put microbes on a tight schedule and make them obey. But she comes respectably close.

In full disclosure, you're not going to serve this in neat portions. The noodles fall apart as soon as you scoop them out. But the recipe works exactly as intended. As with many things in this book, you may not win a cookoff, but you will come back for seconds.