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TO CURE HAMS
In the fall, about the first of November, people in the country generally kill a good-sized pig, to last until "butchering time." Το cure the hams of such, first rub well, especially around the bone on fleshy side, with one-half of the salt, sugar, cayenne and saltpetre, well pulverized (same proportions as for corned-beef), adding a teaspoon of allspice to each ham; ; put a layer of salt in bottom of cask, and pack in hams as closely as possible; let stand three or four days, then make a brine of the other half of salt, etc., and pour d pour over meat, putting a good weight on top; when it has lain three or four weeks it is ready for use.
This is a farmhouse brine cure for whole fresh hams, written for people who already knew the corned-beef proportions it refers back to and who had a cold November cellar to work in. As printed it cannot be followed safely.
- The quantities are not on the pageThe salt, sugar, cayenne and saltpetre are given only as "same proportions as for corned-beef," a cross-reference the reader must chase elsewhere in the book. Curing a whole ham is the one meat application where the nitrate figure has to be exact, and this recipe never states it.
- Saltpetre out of rangeSaltpetre is potassium nitrate. Nineteenth-century recipes routinely used it at many times the levels now permitted, and an unmeasured handful in a cask of hams can put nitrate and resulting nitrite well past safe intake. Modern curing uses pre-diluted nitrite mixes precisely so the dose cannot be guessed.
- No temperature is givenA brine cure of this kind depends on holding the meat at roughly refrigerator temperature for the whole period. The recipe relies on the ambient cold of a country cellar "about the first of November" — a condition no modern kitchen reproduces, and one that varied wildly year to year even then.
- Three or four weeks is not a finished hamA brine takes weeks to reach the centre of a bone-in ham, and the interior of a large one will still be under-cured at the stated time. The recipe's "ready for use" refers to a piece of meat that has never been brought to a safe temperature and whose safety rests entirely on salt and nitrate penetration that has not been verified.
- Around the bone is where it failsThe instruction to rub well "especially around the bone" points at the real weak spot: the deep tissue along the femur is where cure arrives last and where spoilage organisms take hold. Home curers now inject brine along the bone for exactly this reason, and the recipe has no equivalent step.
- If you want to cure a hamUse a current recipe that specifies cure by weight, brine concentration, meat temperature and a tested time-per-pound. This page is worth reading as a record of practice, not as a procedure.
Buckeye Cookery grew out of an Ohio church compilation of the mid-1870s and circulated widely in editions from 1877 onward, addressed to households that produced most of their own meat; its directions for cutting and curing assume a farm year rather than a market. The pig killed "about the first of November" and eaten until "butchering time" fits the familiar rhythm: an early animal to bridge the gap until the main winter slaughter, once the weather had turned cold enough to keep fresh pork from spoiling while the cure worked. Saltpetre appears here for the same reason it appears in a great many pre-refrigeration meat recipes — it fixes the pink colour and checks organisms that salt alone tolerates — but a cook working from this page had no way to measure or verify its action, and the vagueness of "same proportions as for corned-beef" was unremarkable in books written for readers who had learned the process by watching it.