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HAM, CURED (Warwickshire method)
Rub two ounces of saltpetre well into a leg of pork, and leave it until the next day to drain. Put four quarts of rain-water into a large stewpan, with a peck of pale dried malt, a pound and a half of bay salt, two pounds and a half of common salt, one pound of treacle or moist sugar, and three ounces of sliced onions. Skim carefully, and boil for ten minutes, then pour the liquid through a sieve, hot, upon the meat. Turn the ham, and rub it well every day for three weeks, drain and dry it, and smoke it for three weeks or a month. The ham should be entirely covered with the pickle. Probable cost, 1s. per pound.
This is a nitrate cure and a cold smoke carried out at room temperature over six or seven weeks, with no weight given for the pork and no temperature given at any stage. It cannot be scaled or checked, which is precisely what a modern cure depends on.
- Why the saltpetre is the problemTwo ounces of saltpetre (potassium nitrate) is specified against "a leg of pork" of unstated weight, so the dose per pound is unknowable and may be far above the levels now permitted for cured meat. Nitrate in excess is a genuine toxicological concern, not a matter of taste, and current practice uses precisely weighed nitrite or nitrate blends measured to the gram against a known green weight.
- The brine is never held coldThe pickle is poured on hot and the ham then sits in it for three weeks with daily turning, at whatever temperature the larder happens to be. Modern wet curing is done at refrigerator temperature throughout, because the surface of a large piece of pork in a warming brine is an excellent growth medium long before the salt has penetrated to the bone.
- Cold smoking without a temperatureThree weeks to a month of smoking, at whatever temperature the smoking place happens to provide, is almost certainly well below any temperature that kills pathogens; the recipe gives no temperature at any stage. It is a preservation step that only works if the cure beneath it has already done its job to a measured salt concentration, and nothing here lets you verify that.
- Botulism and the deep muscleA whole bone-in leg cured by surface rubbing and immersion carries the classic risk: brine reaches the femur slowly, and an anaerobic pocket near the bone that is under-salted and un-nitrited is where Clostridium botulinum can grow. Commercial and careful home curers address this by pumping brine along the bone or by equilibrium curing to a calculated percentage.
- Bay salt and pale dried maltBay salt was a coarse sea salt, usually said to have been evaporated in shallow coastal bays, though the name is also traced to the Bay of Biscay salt trade; it was less pure than table salt. Pale dried malt is barley malt kilned at low heat, sold to brewers. Neither is a like-for-like substitute for anything on a supermarket shelf, and the malt is measured by the peck, a dry volume of about two gallons.
- The other archaic termsTreacle here means dark cane molasses, and "moist sugar" is unrefined soft brown sugar. Rain-water was simply the softest water available in an era of hard well water. A stewpan is a wide, straight-sided pan; four quarts is a gallon of brine.
- If you want a Warwickshire-style hamUse a current curing recipe that states cure salt by weight as a percentage of the meat, gives a refrigerated cure time, and gives a smoking temperature. The malt, molasses and onion character of this pickle can be read as a flavour profile, but the preservation method behind it should not be copied.
Cassell's gathers regional English cures under county names, and this pickle's malt-and-treacle character is what marks it out from the plainer sugar-and-salt cures recorded elsewhere in the book; a farmhouse economy in which a brewer's malt and the grocer's molasses were both cheap and to hand may well lie behind it. Curing a leg belonged to the autumn and early-winter killing season, timed for cool weather because cold was the only refrigeration available, and a six-to-seven-week cycle of pickling and smoking was of a length that would carry meat well into the following year. Saltpetre had been in English cures for centuries, valued for the rosy colour and the keeping quality it gave, long before anyone understood that nitrate converts to nitrite and that nitrite is what actually suppresses botulism. The "probable cost, 1s. per pound" is a standing feature of this dictionary, aimed at a housekeeper answerable to a household budget.