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Ham, Mutton, Smoked
Choose a large, fresh leg of mutton; have it cut into the shape of a ham, let it hang for two or three days, then rub it well with a pound of salt, a quarter of a pound of moist sugar, and an ounce of saltpetre, pounded and made warm before the fire. Be careful to cover the hole of the shank with the mixture. Put it in a deep dish, and rub it well with the pickle every day for a fortnight, then drain and dry it; put it under a heavy weight for one day, and hang it in smoke for a week or more. It may be either boiled or broiled. Probable cost, 10d. per pound.
This is a nineteenth-century dry-cure and cold-smoke for a whole leg of mutton, and it belongs to a period before nitrate limits, refrigeration or any measurable control of smokehouse temperature. The notes below explain the terms and then why the method fails modern food-safety practice.
- Why this cannot be made as writtenThe cure is specified per leg rather than per pound of meat, so the actual nitrate concentration depends entirely on how large the leg happens to be. A whole ounce of saltpetre on a joint of uncertain weight gives no way to stay inside modern limits for nitrate in cured meat, and the recipe gives no temperature at any stage.
- SaltpetrePotassium nitrate, used here as the colour-fixing and preserving agent. Modern curing uses precisely weighed nitrite or nitrate blends dosed as parts per million of the meat weight; an ounce eyeballed onto a leg is not a dose, it is a guess.
- The smoking step"Hang it in smoke for a week or more" gives no temperature, and a week of smoking most likely means a cold or barely warm smoke, holding the meat for days in a range where Clostridium botulinum and other pathogens can grow. Whatever made this survivable in a period chimney or smokehouse -- a heavy cure, a cold building -- is nowhere defined in the recipe.
- The fortnight of rubbingTwo weeks in a deep dish, rubbed with the pickle daily, presupposes a cold larder. There is no instruction to keep the meat below any particular temperature, and none to discard it if the pickle turns.
- "Let it hang for two or three days"Hanging the fresh leg in a cool place before salting was normal practice in a house with a cold larder. It is not a step that transfers to a domestic kitchen, and it compounds the uncertainty about the meat's condition when the salt goes on.
- Moist sugarUnrefined soft brown sugar, still damp from the refining process. Light brown sugar is the nearest current equivalent, though the term is only worth knowing for reading other recipes in this book.
- Probable costTenpence per pound in pre-decimal currency, one of the price notes Cassell's attached to many of its entries so a housekeeper could budget. It says nothing about the method's soundness.
- If you want mutton hamBuy it from a producer working to a modern schedule, or follow a current curing recipe that states cure percentages by meat weight and gives temperatures for both the cure and the smoke.
Mutton ham was a real and widely eaten thing in Britain, particularly in Scotland and the Borders, where sheep were plentiful and pig-keeping less universal; a leg of mutton trimmed to the shape of a ham, salted and hung in the chimney smoke, gave a household a keeping joint from the animal it actually had. The technique is the same one applied to pork — dry salt, sugar for flavour and to soften the harshness of the cure, saltpetre for colour and preservation, then pressure and smoke — and the instruction to "cut it into the shape of a ham" is the giveaway that the pork version was the model being imitated. Cassell's, compiled for late-Victorian middle-class households, includes it among a long run of curing and preserving entries that assume a cold larder, a chimney or smokehouse, and a cook who has done this before. The costing in pence per pound places it firmly in a book meant for managing a domestic budget rather than for pleasure reading, and the casual mention of hanging meat in smoke for a week or more shows how much of period food preservation depended on conditions that no longer exist in a modern home.