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Ham, Cured with Hot Pickle
Rub a ham weighing about eighteen pounds with an ounce and a half of pounded saltpetre, and an ounce and a half of brown sugar. Leave it until the next day, then make a hot pickle, by putting one quart of strong beer or porter into a saucepan, with two pounds of salt, half a pound of brown sugar, an ounce of black pepper, an ounce of allspice, and a small piece of sal prunella (purified saltpetre). Pour this, when boiling hot, over the ham, and let it remain for three weeks, rubbing in twice or three times every day. Drain and dredge it, and, if possible, smoke it for a fortnight. A ham cured in this way has very much the flavour of a Westphalian ham. Probable cost, 1s. per pound. HAM, ESSENCE OF, FOR GRAVY. (See GRAVY, ESSENCE OF HAM FOR.)
This is a Victorian dry-then-wet cure for a whole raw leg, and it depends on assumptions about cold larders, unrefined salt and curing salts that no longer hold. The notes below explain what the ingredients were and why the method cannot be followed today.
- Saltpetre and sal prunellaBoth are potassium nitrate; sal prunella is simply nitrate melted and cast into cakes, sold as a purer grade. Nitrate must be converted by bacteria into nitrite before it preserves anything, a slow and unpredictable process, and here it is used at an unmeasured rate over an unspecified "small piece." Modern curing uses precisely dosed nitrite blends for exactly this reason.
- The boiling picklePouring pickle over the meat at boiling point cooks the outer surface and, more importantly, puts the whole vessel into the temperature range where spoilage and pathogenic organisms multiply while the brine slowly falls to larder temperature. Nothing in the recipe controls how quickly that happens.
- Three weeks at unstated temperatureThe cure assumes a cold, unheated larder. A modern kitchen is 20C or more, and a domestic refrigerator will not hold an eighteen-pound ham in a tub of brine. Without a stated and maintained temperature, the timing is meaningless.
- Cold smoking for a fortnightA fortnight of smoke cannot be hot smoke, so the leg spends a long period at temperatures where Clostridium botulinum is a genuine hazard, and it is why commercial cold-smoked hams are made under regulated nitrite levels, water activity targets and monitored temperatures. This recipe specifies none of them.
- Salt strength is not verifiableTwo pounds of salt in a quart of beer, poured over eighteen pounds of meat, gives no way to know the salt concentration reaching the interior of the leg. Curers work to a percentage of the meat's weight, checked by scales, not to a jugful of pickle.
- If you want the flavourBuy a properly made dry-cured or smoked ham, or follow a current curing recipe from a source that gives cure percentages, core temperatures and holding times. Do not adapt the quantities above.
- Reading the rest of it"Porter" is a dark, malty top-fermented beer; "dredge" here means to dust the drained ham with flour or bran to form a dry coating before smoking; "probable cost, 1s. per pound" is Cassell's habitual price note and reflects late-nineteenth-century British money.
Westphalian ham, the standard the recipe is reaching for, is a beech- and juniper-smoked cure from the region east of the Rhine, and by the nineteenth century it had become the byword in English cookery books for the finest smoked ham. Cassell's answer is a domestic imitation built on what an English kitchen actually had: porter, brown sugar, black pepper and allspice, with saltpetre to fix the colour. Beer- and porter-based pickles appear in a number of British curing recipes of the period. The instruction to rub the ham two or three times a day for three weeks indicates a household able to give the tub daily attention over most of a month.