Baked Ham
Select a lean ham, weighing from twelve to fourteen pounds, cover with cold water or equal parts of water and sweet cider and let soak (skin side up) over night. Drain, scrape and trim off all objectionable parts about the knuckle. Cover flesh side with a dough made of flour and water. Place in a dripping pan, skin side down. Bake in a hot oven until dough is a dark brown; reduce heat and bake very slowly five hours. Ham enclosed in dough needs no basting. Remove dough, turn ham over and peel off the skin. Sprinkle ham with sugar, cover with grated bread crumbs and bake twenty to thirty minutes. Remove from oven and decorate with cloves; place a paper frill on knuckle, garnish with sprays of parsley and lemon cut in fancy shapes. Serve hot or cold.
A whole bone-in ham baked inside a flour-and-water crust, which acts as a sealed jacket so the meat steams in its own moisture. Most of the adjustments needed today come from the fact that the ham itself has changed.
- The ham is not the same hamA twelve- to fourteen-pound ham in 1913 meant a heavily salt-cured, often dry-cured whole leg that genuinely needed an overnight soak to be edible. Nearly every supermarket ham now is a mild wet-cured, fully cooked "city ham"; soaking it does nothing and long baking dries it out. If you buy a true dry-cured country ham, the overnight soak still applies.
- Oven temperatures"A hot oven" is roughly 425-450F, used only long enough to set and colour the crust, perhaps 20-30 minutes. "Very slowly" is around 300F or a little below. The recipe gives no temperature for the final browning after the crumbs go on.
- Cook to temperature, not to five hoursFive hours at low heat suits a raw or dry-cured leg. Judge by an instant-read thermometer in the thickest part away from the bone: 145F for an uncooked cured ham, 140F for reheating a fully cooked one. Overshooting turns the lean cuts stringy.
- The dough is a wrapper, not foodThis is huff paste: flour and cold water mixed stiff. The recipe gives no proportions or thickness. It is discarded, so no fat or salt is needed. Seal it well and patch cracks, or the steam escapes and the point of the method is lost.
- Sweet ciderMeans unfermented apple cider, not hard cider or cider vinegar. Used half-and-half with water in the soak it takes a little of the salt edge off and adds faint sweetness.
- Crumbs and sugar"Grated bread crumbs" are dry crumbs from stale bread, finer than panko. Brown sugar patted onto the hot fat before the crumbs go on gives a better crust than white; press firmly so it adheres.
- The cloves are decoration hereNote that this recipe scores nothing and inserts the cloves only after baking, purely for appearance. If you want clove flavour through the fat, stud the scored fat before the final browning instead.
- YieldA whole ham of this size serves 20 to 25 hot, with a good deal left for cold slicing, sandwiches and the stock that a picked-over ham bone will give.
52 Sunday Dinners was issued by the Rumford Company early in the twentieth century as a year of complete menus. The flour-paste jacket is much older than the book: cooks called it huff paste or huff crust, and it was one way to roast a large joint or a whole fish before ovens held steady temperatures, the crust taking the brunt of the heat while the meat inside effectively steams. The overnight soak is the other survival from an earlier kitchen, when hams were preserved by salt alone and arrived at the cook far saltier than anything sold today. The paper frill on the knuckle, the parsley and the fancy-cut lemon belong to the same period's fondness for the presented joint carried whole to the table and carved in front of the company.