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Ham Smoked at Home
When there is no chimney which can be used for the purpose, hams may be smoked as follows:--Fill an old cask, open at both ends, with oak sawdust. Fasten a stick across the top, on which the hams should be hung, and bury in the middle of the sawdust a bar of red-hot iron. Cover the cask, to keep in the smoke, and let the heat be as equal as possible, or the ham will be spoilt. The length of time required will depend upon the size of the ham. A large one should remain four days.
This is a cold-smoking instruction from an era when the preceding salt cure was assumed knowledge and no thermometer existed in most kitchens. Read for what it tells you about improvised smokehouses, not as a working method.
- No cure is specifiedThe entry presumes the ham has already been through a salt or brine cure, but gives no quantity of salt, no nitrite or saltpetre level, and no curing time. Cold smoking an uncured or under-cured ham for four days holds a large piece of meat in the temperature range where Clostridium botulinum, Listeria and staphylococci grow, and smoke itself is not a preservative at these levels.
- Nothing reaches a safe temperatureA bar of iron buried in sawdust smoulders; it does not cook. The interior of the ham never approaches 145F/63C, the temperature that would make it safe to eat, and the method offers no way to measure what temperature it does reach.
- "Let the heat be as equal as possible"This is the hinge of the original and it is hard to achieve with a single iron bar, which must cool as it sits. The original gives no instruction for renewing it. Modern curing depends on holding a narrow band, commonly cited as below about 85F for cold smoke, verified with a probe.
- The cask is a fire riskRed-hot iron in dry oak sawdust inside a covered barrel is a smouldering fire with an unpredictable air supply, and a sealed, self-feeding sawdust fire can flare when the cover is lifted.
- Sawdust mattersOak is what the entry calls for and remains a sound smoking wood, but modern sawdust is likely to come from treated, glued or painted timber. Only untreated hardwood dust intended for smoking is ever suitable.
- If you want smoked hamUse a current, tested curing recipe with weighed salt, a measured nitrite cure and stated temperatures at every stage, or buy the ham already cured and smoked.
The whole point of this entry is what to do when there is no chimney to use. Through the nineteenth century smoking a ham at home commonly meant hanging it in the wide flue of a kitchen chimney or a dedicated smoke closet built beside it, where the household's own wood fire supplied the smoke over days or weeks. As open hearths gave way to closed ranges, improvised substitutes appear in the domestic literature: barrels, packing cases, disused coppers. The sequence taken for granted here is salt first, smoke second; the salt cure did the preserving and the smoke added flavour and dried the surface.