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HAM, CURED (in the Yorkshire way)
Let the ham hang for twenty-four hours after the hog is cut up, sprinkle a handful of salt over it, and lay it on a board to drain. For a ham weighing fourteen or sixteen pounds, take one pound of common salt, half a pound of bay salt, an ounce and a quarter of saltpetre, and half an ounce of moist sugar. Dry these well before the fire, pound them in a mortar, mix them thoroughly, and rub them into every part of the ham. Let it lie four days, turning it every day, then pour over it a pound of treacle, and leave it for three weeks; turn it regularly, and baste it frequently. At the end of that time put it into cold water for twenty-four hours. Wipe it very dry, and hang it in a cool, dry, airy place. Probable cost of ham, 1s. per pound.
This is a dry cure for a raw pork leg, held at cellar temperature for a month and then hung to dry without cooking or smoking. Read it as a document of nineteenth-century farmhouse practice rather than a working method; the nitrate dose, the uncontrolled temperature and the absence of any measured endpoint all fall outside what can be done safely now.
- The saltpetre is far out of rangeAn ounce and a quarter of potassium nitrate — about 35 g — rubbed into a 14–16 lb ham works out at several thousand parts per million on the green weight, well above the ingoing nitrate and nitrite levels permitted in modern curing, which are regulated in the hundreds of parts per million. The recipe's 24-hour soak takes out surface salts but does not undo what has penetrated the muscle.
- No temperature is given anywhereEvery safe cure specifies a holding temperature, usually 36–40F, because salt penetrates slowly and spoilage bacteria do not. "A cool, dry, airy place" described a stone larder in a British winter and means nothing in a centrally heated house.
- Nothing here ever reaches a safe temperatureThe ham is salted, steeped in treacle, soaked and hung — it is never cooked. A dry-cured ham eaten raw depends on water activity and salt concentration being driven low enough to be inhospitable, and this recipe gives no weight loss target, no brine strength and no way to verify either.
- Botulism and the whole-muscle problemCuring a large intact leg at ambient temperature leaves an anaerobic interior, the setting in which Clostridium botulinum is a recognised hazard; nitrate was used empirically for colour and keeping quality long before its inhibiting effect on that organism was understood. Getting the balance wrong in either direction — too little and the interior is at risk, too much and the cure itself is the hazard — is why this is now measured to the gram.
- Bay saltNot a herb. Bay salt was coarse solar-evaporated sea salt, traditionally associated with the Bay trade, sold as a dirtier, larger-grained product than refined "common salt." It is not a modern retail item.
- Treacle and moist sugarTreacle is dark cane syrup, closest to British black treacle or blackstrap molasses; American molasses is lighter and less bitter. "Moist sugar" is unrefined soft brown sugar, still damp with molasses rather than the dried granulated sort.
- The price line"1s. per pound" is one shilling, a costing note Cassell's attached to most entries so a housekeeper could budget. A whole ham at that rate represented a serious outlay for a working household.
- If you want a Yorkshire hamUse a current recipe from a source that specifies cure percentages by weight of meat, a nitrite or nitrate product sold for the purpose, a measured chamber temperature and humidity, and a target weight loss.
Yorkshire hams were the sweet-cured, long-hung style that made the county's name in the London provision trade; York ham was sold pale and mild against other regional cures. The molasses-and-saltpetre dry rub here is the standard farmhouse pattern of the period, sugar added partly for flavour and partly because it softens the harshness of a heavy salt cure. In the 1870s and 80s a household that kept a pig still expected to break it down and preserve it itself, in the late autumn and winter when the weather had turned cold enough to work emtemperature control anperature control anyone had.