Jambon Soufflé

Jambon soufflé (ham rebuilt with a poached ham soufflé) teaches that a soufflé can be structural as well as airy. This is not ham with a little soufflé beside it. You carve away the cushion, leave a substantial bed of meat on the end bone, then rebuild the joint with that same ham transformed into a smooth, light forcemeat. The one true thing to know before touching a pan is this: the ham base must be completely cool before the egg whites enter it.

The original preparation assumed a whole joint already boned by practiced hands, a separate Soufflé de Jambon ready in the larder, and an oven made intensely humid over boiling water. Your honest equivalents are a fully cooked shank-end ham prepared by the butcher, a food processor instead of prolonged pounding and sieving, and a deep covered roasting pan that becomes a home steamer. Starting with cooked ham removes the long cook-and-cool cycle, which is brigade scaffolding. Using part of the removed cushion in the forcemeat also makes sense at home, where another service isn't waiting to use it. One cook, one stove, one evening.

The parchment collar and humid poach stay. They are the dish. The collar preserves the ham's contour while the whites expand, and the enclosed moisture sets that expansion without baking a hard crust. Cool the panade, fold gently, fill the collar at once, and leave the chamber closed for the first 45 minutes. Lumps and a slipping collar can be repaired, ça se rattrape, but air crushed from warm forcemeat cannot be whisked back in.