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Ham, Cured
Do not let the pig be killed in either damp or frosty weather, and remember that if it is not fully twelve months old, the ham will not be good. Let the ham hang a day or two after it is cut up, sprinkle a little salt over it, and let it drain for another day. Rub over it very thoroughly a quarter of a pound of saltpetre, two pounds of salt, and a pound of the very coarsest sugar. Lay it, rind downwards, in a dish, put the salt on the fleshy parts, baste it frequently with the brine which runs from it, and turn it every other day. It must remain for four weeks; at the end of that time drain it, and throw some bran over it. It is now ready to be either smoked or hung. If smoked, oak, green birch, or juniper should be burnt under it; pine shavings would spoil the flavour. If it is to be hung, let it be in a cool place; watch it carefully, and if any part should get rancid and yellow, scrape it off, and rub the place with pepper, salt, and flour, mixed together in equal proportions. Three months should elapse before the ham is cut. If it is hung in a hot place, the ham will be hard and dry; if in a very cold one, it will be a longer time before it is ready to cook. If hams, when hung, seem not likely to keep well, they should be put into the pickle again, and kept there till wanted, and used as soon as convenient. If the brine should become slimy and disagreeable, it should be boiled, or, better still, a fresh pickle made. Probable cost of ham, 1s. per pound.
This is a whole-hog dry-cure written for an unheated larder and a household that killed its own pig. Read it as a document; the method itself falls outside what can be done safely in a modern kitchen.
- No weight for the meatThe cure gives a quarter pound of saltpetre, two pounds of salt and a pound of sugar, but never says how large the ham is. Nitrate dosage in curing is calculated as a percentage of meat weight, and without that figure the recipe cannot be scaled to any legal or safe level of residual nitrate.
- Saltpetre is not table saltPotassium nitrate is regulated in food use for good reason, and modern curing relies on measured nitrite salts precisely because eyeballed saltpetre in a large joint gives wildly uneven penetration. A quarter pound applied by rubbing is far outside current guidance.
- No temperature anywhereThe four weeks in a dish carry no indication of temperature at all, and only the hanging is qualified, as "a cool place". Dry-curing a bone-in ham depends on holding the meat within a narrow chilled range throughout; a warm spell early in the cure invites spoilage, and the risk of Clostridium botulinum deep beside the bone, where nothing can be seen or smelled, is one reason measured nitrite is used today.
- The brine is reusedThe entry allows hams that seem unlikely to keep to go back into the pickle, and slimy brine to be boiled, though it does say a fresh pickle is better. Boiling kills vegetative bacteria but does not make a fouled brine sound, and it does not touch toxins already formed.
- Scraping off rancid patchesRubbing pepper, salt and flour into a yellow, rancid spot masks it rather than removing the cause. Surface discoloration on a hanging ham can be harmless mould or the outward sign of interior spoilage, and the recipe offers no way to tell them apart.
- The pig itselfA twelve-month-old home-slaughtered animal, bled and butchered outside any inspection regime, is the starting point the whole method assumes. Nothing in the text substitutes for that.
- If you want to cure a hamUse a current recipe with weighed cure percentages and specified chamber temperature and humidity. Nothing here should be adapted.
- The price line"1s. per pound" is one shilling, one of the "probable cost" figures Cassell's routinely appended to its entries. It has no bearing on the method.
Curing of this kind was provisioning rather than cooking. Until refrigeration was general, a household that kept a pig had to turn it into meat that would last, and the calendar advice here -- no damp, no frost, an animal fully twelve months old -- reflects that dependence. The choice of smoking woods is practical: oak, green birch and juniper were among the traditional English and northern European fuels, while resinous pine was avoided because its smoke carries turpentine flavours into the fat. The vigilance the entry demands, with its scraping and re-pickling and watching for slime, suggests how readily the process failed, and why factory-cured bacon and ham found a ready market.