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HAM, CURED (M. Ude's recipe)
As soon as the pig is sufficiently cold to be cut up, take the hams, rub them well with common salt, and let them drain for three days. Dry them, and for two hams, weighing sixteen or eighteen pounds each, take a pound of salt, a pound of moist sugar, and two ounces of saltpetre. Rub the hams thoroughly with this mixture, put them into a deep pan, with the skin downwards, and turn and baste them every day for a month, at the end of three days pouring a bottle of good vinegar over them. Drain, and dry them well, and, if they are to be smoked, hang them high in the chimney, to keep the fat from melting. "This," says M. Ude, "is superior to a Westphalian ham." Probable cost, 1s. per pound.
This is a nineteenth-century dry cure for a whole fresh ham, and it fails modern practice on the two points that matter most in curing: the amount of nitrate and the temperature at which the meat sits. The notes below explain why rather than how.
- The saltpetre is far out of rangeTwo ounces of saltpetre (potassium nitrate) rubbed onto two hams of sixteen to eighteen pounds each works out to roughly 3.5 to 4 grams per kilogram of meat, far above the residual nitrate permitted in cured meat today, even allowing that not all of a surface rub is absorbed. Saltpetre was used freely and unmeasured in period recipes, for colour as much as for keeping; the toxicological limits came much later.
- No temperature anywhereA month of turning and basting is safe only if the meat stays in the narrow band around 36-40F throughout. The recipe assumes a cold larder in winter, immediately after a pig is killed. Left in a modern kitchen, the interior of an eighteen-pound ham will be in the danger zone for weeks while the salt is still working its way inward.
- Curing depends on penetration, not timeRubbing the surface and basting relies on brine forming in the pan and slowly reaching the bone. Modern whole-muscle curing uses a weighed cure calculated on the exact green weight of the meat, and usually pumps or injects along the femur, precisely because the deep tissue near the bone is where Clostridium botulinum can survive an under-salted cure.
- "Hang them high in the chimney"This is smoking in an uncontrolled flue over a working fire: no measured temperature, no airflow control. Whatever the flue temperature, smoking of this kind does not cook the meat, so the ham comes out raw and dependent entirely on the cure for safety.
- The vinegar is not a safeguardA bottle of vinegar poured over the pan after three days would have been for flavour and surface effect. It does not acidify the interior of a large muscle and contributes nothing to the microbial safety of the finished ham.
- What the archaic terms mean"Moist sugar" is unrefined or partly refined soft brown sugar, damp and clumping rather than free-running like granulated. "Common salt" is plain ordinary salt with no additives. "Probable cost, 1s. per pound" is the standard price note carried by entries in this book.
- If you want to cure a hamUse a current recipe that gives cure quantities as a percentage of green weight, specifies a nitrite or nitrate cure by product name, and states holding temperatures. Nothing here should be scaled or adjusted into use.
Louis Eustache Ude was among the best-known French chefs working in England in the early nineteenth century: he cooked for aristocratic households and later ran the kitchens at Crockford's club, and his The French Cook (1813) went through many editions. Cassell's, compiled decades later, quotes him by name as a mark of authority, and his parting boast is the point of the entry. Westphalian ham, dry-cured and cold-smoked over beech in what is now western Germany, was the standard by which cured hams were judged in English cookbooks of the period, much as Parma ham serves now; claiming to beat it was a chef's flourish. The recipe also shows how tied such curing was to the farming calendar, beginning not with a shopping list but with a pig killed in cold weather and "sufficiently cold to be cut up" -- the cure had to be started at once, and the whole month-long process depended on the winter chill of an unheated larder.