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HAM, CURED (West Country method)
Take three or four hams weighing fourteen or sixteen pounds each. Let them hang for a day, then rub well into each one two ounces of sal prunella, two ounces of saltpetre, and one pound of salt. Put the hams into a deep pan, and turn them over and rub them each day for three days. Make a pickle by boiling together three gallons of water, four pounds of common salt, four pounds of bay salt, and seven pounds of moist sugar. Skim thoroughly, and when the pickle has boiled for twenty minutes, pour it hot over the meat. The hams must be rubbed and turned daily, and their relative position altered, the one at the top being put to the bottom, and so on. At the end of three weeks they must be drained and dried, and smoked, if practicable. This pickle will be found excellent for beef, bacon, tongues, etc., and will keep for several months if it be boiled and skimmed each time it is used, and kept closely corked. Salt and treacle should be added also to make up for the strength evaporating. Probable cost, 1s. per pound.
This is a full-scale nitrate cure for raw pork intended to be kept for months, and it sits outside what can responsibly be reproduced in a domestic kitchen today. The notes below explain the ingredients and the specific reasons the method fails modern practice.
- Sal prunella and saltpetreSal prunella is potassium nitrate that has been melted and cast into cakes — chemically the same as the saltpetre listed beside it. The recipe therefore applies about four ounces of nitrate to each ham, with no stated conversion to nitrite and no way to measure residual levels. Modern curing salts are sold at a fixed, low percentage of nitrite precisely because the dose has to be controlled.
- No temperature anywhereRaw pork sits in brine for three weeks with no chilling specified. The whole method assumes a cold Victorian larder or cellar in winter. Curing brine held in the wrong temperature band supports the growth of Clostridium botulinum and other pathogens in the deep muscle, where salt penetrates last.
- The reused pickleKeeping the same brine for several months, topped up with salt and treacle and re-boiled between uses, is the most dangerous instruction on the page. Boiling kills vegetative bacteria but not spores, and the brine's actual salt concentration after repeated use and evaporation is unknown and unmeasurable by eye.
- Smoking "if practicable"The recipe does not say what kind of smoking is meant, but at this stage it would be a preservative treatment rather than cooking; nothing here brings the meat to a cooked temperature. The finished ham is a raw product relying entirely on salt and nitrate for safety. Dry-cured raw hams made commercially are produced under controlled water activity, pH and temperature monitoring.
- Bay salt and moist sugarBay salt was coarse sea salt, traditionally made by evaporation in shallow pans; moist sugar is unrefined or partly refined brown sugar, closer to today's soft brown sugar than to demerara. Neither is exotic, but their crystal size and moisture content changed the strength of the brine in ways the recipe never quantifies.
- ScaleThree or four hams at fourteen to sixteen pounds each is forty-two to sixty-four pounds of pork, plus three gallons of brine. This is a household-scale provisioning operation, not a dish.
- If you want cured hamUse a current recipe from a source that specifies curing salt by percentage, brine strength, refrigeration temperature and internal cooked temperature, or buy the ham.
Cassell's gives this as a West Country method, and the region earned the attribution: Somerset, Devon and Wiltshire were long the heart of English bacon and ham production, and the sweet, sugar-based brine here is often said to be characteristic of the West Country style as distinct from the drier, saltier Yorkshire and Cumberland cures. Sugar in a cure is not sentiment it offsets the harshness of heavy salting. Sal prunella, listed alongside plain saltpetre, was a druggist's item as much as a grocer's; the same fused nitrate cakes were sold for sore throats, and its appearance in a domestic cookbook is a reminder of how thin the line was between the kitchen shelf and the medicine chest in the nineteenth century. The costing at a shilling a pound places the finished ham as a substantial but not extravagant household investment, and the closing note that the pickle will serve for beef, bacon and tongues shows the economy of the thing: one boiling of brine was expected to keep for several months.