Home › The Principles of Cookery › Ham, Baked
Ham, Baked
A baked ham is much more delicious than a boiled one, and will keep better. Put a ham into plenty of cold water for some hours. If very hard and salt, twenty-four hours will be necessary; for an ordinary York ham from eight to twelve hours is sufficient. Then soak it for an hour in lukewarm water, wash it, trim it neatly, and cut away all the rusty smoked parts. Cover it with a coarse paste made of flour and water, and take care to leave no loophole through which the gravy can escape. Bake in a moderate oven. Remove the paste and skin while the ham is still hot, cover it with raspings, and brown it before the fire. Time, according to the size. A very small ham will require fully three hours, and a large one five. 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 it. Probable cost, 1s. per pound.
This is a whole bone-in dry-cured ham baked in a flour-and-water crust rather than boiled. Two things separate it from anything you would buy today: the salt level of the meat, and the length of the cooking.
- Know which ham you haveThe instructions assume a raw, heavily salted, dry-cured ham of the York type, which genuinely needs a long soak to become edible. A supermarket "ham" today is wet-cured, mild and usually fully cooked, and soaking it for twelve hours will only make it watery. Long soaking applies to raw, heavily salted hams such as American country ham and traditional British dry-cured hams.
- "A moderate oven"350F (175C). For a paste-covered joint of this size, the lower end of moderate, around 325F, gives more even results over several hours.
- The coarse pasteThis is huff paste or dead dough: flour and water only, no fat, rolled thick and sealed with no gaps. It is a disposable vessel, not pastry, and it is discarded. Its job is to hold steam and juices against the meat, so a torn seam genuinely does cost you the gravy.
- Timing is the outdated partTwenty-eight minutes per pound will take a ham far past anything a modern cook wants. Judge by a thermometer at the thickest point, clear of the bone, rather than by the clock; the crust means you must break a small window to probe it. A raw dry-cured ham is generally taken to about 150F, and residual heat carries it further.
- RaspingsDried breadcrumbs, made by baking stale crusts hard and grating or crushing them. Fine dry breadcrumbs are the direct equivalent, and browning "before the fire" means a hot grill or broiler for a few minutes, watched closely.
- Trimming the "rusty" partsThe darkened, dry outer surface of a long-hung cured ham, which tastes rancid and bitter. Pare it away with a knife after washing rather than trying to soak it out.
- Yield and costA 12 lb bone-in ham serves twenty or more as a cold cut and keeps for over a week refrigerated. The "1s. per pound" is consistent with a later nineteenth-century price; depending on the trade, a few pounds of it could cost a labourer something in the region of a day's wage.
Baking a ham in a flour-and-water crust was the standard alternative to boiling in nineteenth-century English kitchens, and Cassell's preference for it reflects a real difference: the crust traps moisture and rendered fat against the meat instead of leaching salt and flavour into a pot of water. Huff paste of this kind is much older than the recipe, and cookery books from the seventeenth century onward use similar flour-and-water cases as sealed cooking vessels for joints, venison and pies at a time when ovens were bread ovens with no way to regulate heat. The York ham named here was the prestige joint of the period, dry-salted and lightly smoked, mild by comparison with Westphalian or American country hams but still salty enough to demand the overnight soak. Finishing with raspings and a scorch before the fire gave the cold ham the dark, even crust expected on a sideboard joint, a dish meant to be carved thin and served cold over many days rather than eaten hot at one meal.