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A NEW WAY TO SMOKE HAMS
Smoke the barrel, in which the hams are to be pickled, by inverting it over a kettle containing a slow fire of hard wood, for eight days (keeping water on the head to prevent shrinking); in this barrel pack the hams, and pour over them, after er it has cooled, a brine made in the proportion of four gallons of water, eight pounds of salt, five pints of molasses, and four ounces saltpetre, boiled and skimmed in the usual manner. They will be cured in eight or nine days, and they may be kept in the pickle for a year without damage.
This is a whole-muscle cure with no temperature control and no cooking step, and it cannot be reproduced safely. The points below explain where it fails rather than how to adapt it.
- Nothing here actually smokes the meatThe wood smoke is applied to the empty barrel, not to the hams. Smoke deposited on staves eight days before the meat goes in contributes flavour at best; it does none of the surface drying or antimicrobial work that hanging a ham in a smokehouse does. The hams emerge raw, wet and unsmoked.
- No temperature is given, and temperature is the whole gameBrine curing depends on holding the meat below about 40F for the entire cure. A 19th-century cellar in an Ohio winter may have managed that; the instruction as written does not say so, and a barrel of molasses brine at room temperature is a growth medium.
- Eight or nine days will not cure a hamBrine penetrates whole muscle at roughly a quarter-inch per day. A bone-in ham of 12 to 18 pounds needs weeks, and the standard modern practice is to pump brine into the interior as well. After nine days the outside is salty and the deep tissue near the bone is uncured fresh pork.
- Uncured interior plus a sealed barrel is the botulism scenarioUncured interior in a sealed barrel is where the real risk sits -- Clostridium botulinum is anaerobic and can grow in low-oxygen, moist, incompletely salted meat that is not held cold. The brine as mixed here is very salty at the surface, but there is no way to know whether enough salt or nitrite reached the centre of the ham.
- Saltpetre is nitrate, not nitrite, and the dose is uncontrolledSaltpetre is nitrate, not nitrite -- Four ounces of potassium nitrate in four gallons of brine relies on bacteria in the barrel to reduce nitrate to nitrite over time, so the effective nitrite level at any given moment is unknown, and the recipe gives no way to control how much reaches the meat. Modern curing uses pre-blended nitrite salts precisely to avoid that uncertainty.
- A year in the pickle is a claim, not a methodKeeping cured meat submerged for twelve months requires the brine to stay strong, cold and free of spoilage organisms, and requires checking and reboiling it. None of that is specified, and there is no way to judge from the surface whether a ham held that long is sound.
- If you want a molasses-cured hamUse a current recipe from a source that specifies cure percentages by weight of meat, injection or equilibrium timing, holding temperature and a final internal cooking temperature.
Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping (1877) came out of Ohio church-fundraiser circles, and its meat-curing chapter assumes a household that killed its own hogs in late autumn and had a cool cellar to work in — the whole calendar of salting, smoking and packing down ran on winter weather rather than thermometers. The molasses-and-saltpetre brine is a standard American sweet pickle of the period, the sugar softening the harshness of a heavy salt cure and the saltpetre keeping the meat red instead of grey. What makes this entry a "new way" is the smoked barrel: smoking a cask instead of building and tending a smokehouse fire around the hams promised something of the same flavour for a fraction of the work. It is a good illustration of how these community collections circulated ideas, with no way for a reader to test whether the shortcut actually did what the original process did.