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HAM, BAKED (another way)
Soak and prepare the ham as in the last recipe. Put it in warm water for at least an hour, then lay it in a deep pie-dish, with a quarter of a pint of nicely-flavoured stock. Cover it with oiled paper, and afterwards place a good thick coarse crust over it, as in the case of a meat pie. Add a little more stock, if required. Bake in a moderate oven from three to five hours, according to size. The rule is to allow twenty-eight minutes to every pound up to twelve pounds, and a quarter of an hour for every pound beyond that weight. Probable cost, 1s. per pound.
A whole ham baked under a flour-and-water crust, which acts as a sealed vessel rather than as pastry. The crust is a tool, not food.
- The crust is not for eatingThe crust is probably not meant for eating -- A "good thick coarse crust" of this kind is what other books call huff paste: worked stiff, rolled thick, and serving mainly to trap steam and keep the ham from drying. The recipe does not say what to do with it, but a crust used this way is normally lifted off and discarded before carving.
- Quantities and vesselA quarter of a pint in an English book of this period is 5 fl oz, a generous half cup. A "deep pie-dish" is any lidless oven dish with high sides, ideally one the ham fits snugly in so the small amount of stock is not lost to evaporation.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 325-350F on a modern dial; the book gives no temperatures. If the crust is browning hard before the ham is through, err to the lower end rather than tenting it — the paste is already the tent.
- Oiled paperParchment brushed with a neutral oil. It stops the paste sticking to the meat and makes the crust easy to lift away in one piece.
- Ignore the 28-minute ruleTreat the 28-minute rule with caution -- Applied as written (28 min/lb to 12 lb, then 15 min/lb) a 15 lb ham comes to about 6 hr 20 min, longer than the three-to-five hours the same recipe gives. Cook to internal temperature instead: 145-150F at the thickest point, away from the bone.
- Soaking depends on the hamThe overnight-and-then-warm-water soak assumes a heavily dry-salted ham of the old sort. A modern mild-cured or brine-injected ham needs little or no soaking, and many supermarket hams are sold already fully cooked — those need only reheating, to at least 140F, in which case this method is being used purely to keep them moist.
- Serving and costAllow roughly 1/3 to 1/2 lb per person off the bone from a bone-in ham. The "1s. per pound" is a Victorian retail price and has no bearing on anything now; the book gives a probable cost for most of its recipes, for the household accounts.
Baking meat under a thick flour-and-water paste — huff paste — is an old technique, and it survives in this book as a way of getting the effect of a sealed braise from a domestic range. The same logic runs through salt-crust fish and the older raised pies, where the pastry was a container first and a food second, if at all. That Cassell's gives this as "another way" is suggestive: one might infer from the heading that boiling a ham in a copper was the more usual treatment and baking the refinement, praised in Victorian household writing for keeping the juices in the joint rather than leaving them in the water. The instruction to soak first is the real mark of the period, when a farmhouse ham had been packed in dry salt for weeks and would be inedibly salty straight from the hook.