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HAM, BOILED (another way)
Prepare the ham as above. Put it into a saucepan, and with it a quart of beer, a pint of vinegar, and as much water as will just cover it. Carrots and sweet herbs must not be omitted. Calculate the time which must be required to cook it according to the rule given in the last recipe, and let the ham be simmered two-thirds of the time, and baked in a moderate oven for the rest. It must be skinned and covered with bread-crumbs before it is put into the oven. Time, from three to five hours, according to size. Probable cost, 1s. per pound.
A two-stage ham: most of the cooking in a spiced beer-and-vinegar bath, the last third in the oven under a crumb crust. The instructions assume a raw, heavily salted, dry-cured ham of a kind now sold mainly by specialist curers.
- "Prepare the ham as above""Prepare the ham as above" points back to the preceding ham entries, which in books of this kind normally means soaking. A traditional dry-cured raw ham may need 12 to 24 hours in several changes of cold water before it goes near heat, or the finished meat will be very salty. A modern supermarket "gammon" or wet-cured ham needs little or no soaking, and a ham labelled fully cooked should not be simmered at all.
- The cooking rule being referencedThe rule referred to is in the previous entry and is not reproduced on this page; Victorian boiling times for ham generally ran somewhere in the region of 15 to 25 minutes per pound. Judge doneness by internal temperature instead: 150-160F at the thickest point, away from the bone, is where the meat is cooked through and still sliceable.
- Imperial liquid measuresA quart of beer here is 40 imperial fluid ounces, about 1.1 litres or 4.75 US cups; the pint of vinegar is 20 fl oz, about 570 ml or 2.4 US cups. That is a very sharp bath by current taste, and cutting the vinegar by half while making up the difference with water changes little except the bite.
- What beer meantNineteenth-century household beer was generally milder and less aggressively bitter than a modern IPA, which will turn the liquor harsh as it reduces; a brown ale, mild or stout is closer to the likely original.
- "A moderate oven""A moderate oven" is conventionally taken as somewhere around 350F (175C), though the book gives no temperatures. The recipe bakes the ham for the final third of the calculated time — roughly an hour to an hour and forty minutes here — so the oven stage finishes the cooking as well as setting and browning the crumbs.
- Skinning and crumbingPeel the rind away while the ham is hot from the pot, leaving the fat behind, then score the fat and press on the crumbs. Cold ham fat will not hold them. The period crumb was raspings, dried crusts grated fine; dry breadcrumbs, not fresh, are what you want, and a spoonful of brown sugar or mustard worked through them is within the tradition.
- Carrots and sweet herbs"Sweet herbs" is the standard bundle of the day: parsley, thyme and bay, sometimes with marjoram. Add a couple of onions and a few peppercorns; the liquor is discarded, so the aromatics are working on the meat alone.
- Yield and costTime is given as three to five hours, which brackets a ham of roughly 8 to 14 lb. A 10 lb ham on the bone will serve 20 or more hot, with plenty left to slice cold. The "1s. per pound" is a period price note, not an instruction.
Boiling a ham in beer rather than plain water was a practice often met with in British kitchens well before Cassell's compiled this dictionary in the 1870s, and the vinegar had a purpose beyond flavour: heavily salted, long-hung hams were tough as well as salty, and an acidic liquor was believed to soften the fibres. The finishing stage in the oven under breadcrumbs is the "glazed and crusted" treatment, generally taken to be the older of the two alongside the sugar-and-clove glaze; raspings gave a dry, biscuit-coloured coat that sliced cleanly and kept the cut face of a cold ham from drying out on the sideboard through a week of meals. That last point explains why a book of this period gives so many ham recipes. A whole cured ham was a keeping joint in a house without refrigeration, brought to the table hot once and then worked through cold for days, which is also why the price per pound was worth printing.