Home › How to Cut and Cure Meats › TO KEEP HAMS AFTER CURING
TO KEEP HAMS AFTER CURING
Cut hams in slices suitable for cooking, trim off the rind, and pack as compactly as possible in a stone jar; over the top pour melted lard, so as to completely exclude the air. When ham is wanted for use, scrape off the lard, remove a layer of meat, and always be particular to melt the lard and return it immediately to the jar. It will keep through the season.
This is a pre-refrigeration storage method, not a dish, and it is the one category of old meat instruction that does not survive translation to a modern kitchen. The notes below explain what the original assumed and why the method fails today.
- An anaerobic seal on unheated meatSealing sliced meat under a layer of solidified fat excludes oxygen. Anaerobic storage of unheated meat at ambient temperature is the sort of condition under which Clostridium botulinum can, if salt and temperature are insufficient, germinate and produce toxin, and nothing in this procedure heats the meat or the jar. The meat goes in raw-cured and comes out raw-cured.
- No cure is specified or verifiedThe recipe depends entirely on the curing done elsewhere in the chapter, with no stated salt concentration, nitrite or nitrate quantity, or finished water activity. Safety under fat rested on the ham being salt-heavy and genuinely dry; there is no way to confirm that from this text, and no measurable target given.
- "Through the season" is not a shelf lifeThe original assumed a stone crock in a cool cellar or springhouse; the text names no temperature and no duration. A modern pantry or kitchen cupboard sits at 65-75F, well inside the growth range for the organisms this method does nothing to control.
- Repeated opening is the weak pointEach time a layer is lifted out, the lard is remelted with a utensil and poured back over meat that has been handled and exposed. The instruction to return the fat "immediately" is an acknowledgement of the risk, not a control for it. Every cycle reintroduces surface contamination beneath a fresh airtight seal.
- Modern hams are not the same productMost commercial ham today is wet-cured, pumped with brine, mildly salted and sold for refrigerated storage. Its moisture content is far higher than the hard, dry, heavily salted country ham this passage was written for, so even the original logic does not apply to what you would usually buy.
- If you want cured ham to keepFollow a current, tested method with measured cure quantities and stated storage temperatures, or simply refrigerate or freeze the sliced meat. Do not adapt this one.
- Stone jarA glazed earthenware crock, the standard vessel for anything held under fat, brine or vinegar in a nineteenth-century cellar. It appears throughout this book and is worth recognising when it turns up in other recipes.
Potting cooked or cured meat under a sealed layer of rendered fat is one of the oldest keeping methods in European kitchens, and it is the same principle behind French confit and English potted beef and game. Buckeye Cookery, compiled in Minnesota and Ohio in the late 1870s, was written for households that killed and cured their own hogs in late autumn and had to make the meat last until spring, with a cool cellar as their only refrigeration. Slicing the ham before packing it was a practical touch: it let the cook lift out a single meal's worth without breaking down a whole cured leg each time. The method's success depended on a combination the recipe never states -- a hard, dry, salt-saturated ham and a reliably cool place to keep it -- which is exactly why it reads as sound advice in 1877 and as an unacceptable risk now.