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HAM, CURED (an easy way)
Take five ounces of salt, five ounces of bay salt, an ounce and a half of black pepper, an ounce of saltpetre, and three-quarters of a pound of coarse sugar. Dry these ingredients before the fire, pound and mix them thoroughly, and rub the mixture well into the ham. Turn and baste it every day for a month. Drain dry, and hang the ham in a cool, dry, airy place; or, if convenient, smoke it. Two or three hams can be cured in one tub, the above proportion of pickling ingredients being put to each. The hams should change places every other day, from the top to the bottom. Probable cost of ham, 1s. per pound. Sufficient for a ham weighing fourteen pounds.
This is a Victorian dry-cure for a whole fresh leg of pork, and it belongs to a period before anyone measured nitrate in parts per million or kept a curing chamber at a known temperature. The notes below explain the units and the ingredients, and then why the method itself is outside modern safe practice.
- Saltpetre well over the modern limitOne ounce of saltpetre (potassium nitrate) to a fourteen-pound ham works out to roughly seven ounces per hundred pounds of meat. Modern dry-cure limits for nitrate are considerably lower than this, and they assume even distribution — which hand-rubbing a whole leg does not give. Some parts of the ham could carry several times the intended dose.
- Not enough salt for an ambient cureTen ounces of salt and bay salt combined is under five per cent of the meat's weight. Traditional country hams that hung safely at room temperature were packed in far more salt than this, and modern low-salt cures compensate with refrigeration below 40F throughout. A month of turning and basting in an unrefrigerated tub is where Clostridium botulinum and staphylococcal growth become real rather than theoretical.
- No temperature anywhere in the recipe"A cool, dry, airy place" meant a larder or cellar in an unheated house, cold for much of the curing season. It is not a modern kitchen, garage or basement. Without a stated and held temperature for both the cure and the hang, the recipe cannot be followed as printed.
- "Or, if convenient, smoke it"The smoking step is optional here and given no time, temperature or method. Cold-smoking a cured ham is a controlled process in its own right; treating it as an afterthought is one of the clearest signs of how much this recipe leaves to the reader's household knowledge.
- Bay saltCoarse sea salt made by solar evaporation, greyer and less refined than table salt; the name is usually traced to the salt shipped from the Bay of Biscay. Its appeal in curing is generally put down to the large, slow-dissolving crystal.
- Coarse sugarUnrefined or partly refined cane sugar, closer to today's demerara or light muscovado than to white granulated. Three-quarters of a pound is a genuinely sweet cure, of a kind associated with sugar-cured English hams.
- If you want to cure a hamUse a current recipe with weighed nitrite or nitrate expressed as a percentage of meat weight, a stated cure time by thickness, and a refrigerated cure. Do not scale or adjust the proportions above.
Curing a ham was less a dish than a seasonal household operation: a pig killed in cold weather, the legs put down in a tub, the family eating from the results for months. The instruction that two or three hams may share one tub, changing places top to bottom every other day, is the practical heart of it — the liquid that the salt and sugar draw out of the meat pools at the bottom, and the hams must take turns lying in it. Saltpetre had been used in curing for centuries before anyone understood that it works by breaking down to nitrite, which fixes the pink colour, contributes the characteristic cured flavour and inhibits botulism. The costing of a shilling a pound, and the assumption that the reader has a cool airy place and possibly somewhere to smoke a ham, mark this as a recipe for a substantial household rather than a town flat.