Ham With Red-Eye Gravy Recipe

Enlarge Image Image Gallery The missing ingredient in breakfast red-eye gravy, according to most, is coffee! Fotolia/Subbotina Anna

Joyce Gilliland, Ladson, South Carolina, sends this recipe.

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Ham With Red-Eye Gravy Recipe

2 tablespoons butter
1 fully cooked ham steak, 1/2 inch thick
1 cup coffee

Heat large skillet until hot; add butter. Melt and add ham. Sauté 8 to 10 minutes on each side. Transfer to heated platter.

Add coffee to drippings in skillet and cook over high heat for 1 minute, scrapping up any bits of ham clinging to bottom of pan.

Pour gravy over ham and serve with grits.

Biscuits With Red-Eye Gravy Recipe

Edie Hutching, Garden Valley, Idaho, sends this: 

My momma also made red-eye gravy, and we dipped our biscuits in it at breakfast time. Here it is:

To ham drippings, from either fried ham or ham cooked in the oven, there is always more fat than you need, so Momma always had us pour off all the fat except for about 2 tablespoons, to which we added about 1/2 to 3/4 cup of fresh, hot, strong coffee — not water — that was made to serve with breakfast.

You stir and scrape the coffee, fat and ham drippings until it is well blended and has taken all the ham remnants from the bottom of the pan. Pour it into a gravy boat or something from which to pour it onto your biscuits, or pour it into small cups for dipping. And yes, it is wonderful poured over the ham — which you do in the skillet or pan in which you cooked the ham. We always used a cast-iron skillet in the oven, so the skillet would be ready for the coffee. Yum!