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TO KEEP HAMS
For one hundred pounds of meat, take eight pounds of salt, two ounces saltpetre, and four gallons water; put hams in this pickle in the fall, keeping them well under the brine; in April, take out, drain three or four days, slice as for cooking, fry nearly as much as for table, pack in stone jars, pressing down the slices as fast as they are laid in the jars; when full, put on a weight, and when entirely cold cover with the fat fried out. Prepared in this way, they retain the ham flavor without being smoked. The gravy left from frying will be found very useful in cooking.
This is a whole-winter preservation method, not a dinner recipe, and it fails on two counts that matter: an uncontrolled cure and months of storage of cooked meat sealed under fat at cellar temperature. The notes below explain the archaic terms and the specific reasons the process is unsafe.
- SaltpetreTwo ounces of saltpetre (potassium nitrate) to 100 lb of meat is the curing agent here. Modern curing uses measured nitrite salts at closely controlled parts-per-million, weighed against the exact weight of meat; raw saltpetre relies on bacterial conversion to nitrite over time, so the actual nitrite level at any moment in the barrel is unknown.
- The brine is thinEight pounds of salt in four gallons of water is roughly 19 percent by weight of the finished brine (about 24 percent of the weight of the water alone), but four gallons will not submerge 100 lb of hams, and the recipe's own instruction to keep them "well under the brine" points to the difficulty. Meat that surfaces spoils, and a brine that drops in strength as it draws water from the hams no longer holds.
- No temperature is givenEverything depends on the fall-to-April storage place staying cold, though the recipe never names one; the book was written for households with unheated cellars. Brine curing must be held near 36-40F throughout; above that, spoilage and pathogen growth outrun the salt penetration.
- Fried "nearly as much as for table"The slices are deliberately left short of fully cooked, to be finished when used. Meat that may not have reached a safe internal temperature and is then sealed away for months is the core failure of the method.
- Sealed under fatCooked meat packed tight, weighted, and covered with rendered fat is an oxygen-free environment. That is precisely the condition Clostridium botulinum favours, and its toxin gives no smell, taste, or visible sign. Confit-style storage is safe today only under refrigeration and for weeks, not as a substitute for smoking or canning.
- Stone jars and weightsThe stone jar is a glazed earthenware crock; the weight is a scrubbed stone or a plate. Neither seals, so the jar depends entirely on the fat cap for exclusion of air, and a cracked or shrunken fat cap admits contamination unnoticed.
- If you want cured hamUse a current, tested curing recipe with weighed nitrite, a stated brine strength, a stated holding temperature and a stated finished internal temperature, or buy the ham cured.
- The fried gravyThe one part of the note that still holds is the last line. Ham drippings, strained and refrigerated, remain excellent for frying eggs, potatoes, and greens.
Buckeye Cookery (1877, out of Marysville, Ohio) belongs to the last generation of American cookbooks written for households that killed their own hogs and had to make the meat last until the next November. Other ham entries in such books commonly assume a smokehouse; this one offers an alternative, and the claim that the slices "retain the ham flavor without being smoked" is a small selling point aimed at that reader. Frying meat down and sealing it under its own fat in a crock is an old and widespread technique — the same logic as French confit and English potted meats — and it was relied on in cold cellars, without anyone knowing why the failures, when they came, were sometimes fatal. Sausage poisoning had been described early in the nineteenth century, but the organism behind botulism was not identified until the 1890s, and the danger was not connected to preserved meats and canned goods in the American home kitchen until well after this book was printed, which is why a recipe like this could be published in good faith.