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Mutton Ham
Choose a short, thick, fresh leg of mutton, weighing twelve or fourteen pounds, and cut it into the form of a ham. Pound in a mortar half a pound of bay salt, one ounce of saltpetre, and half a pound of coarse brown sugar. Make the mixture hot in a stewpan, then rub it thoroughly into the meat. Turn the ham every morning for four days, and rub the pickle well into it. On the fifth day add two ounces more of common salt. Rub and turn it in the brine for twelve days more, then drain, and wipe dry; rub it with dry salt, and hang it up in wood-smoke. No sort of meat is more improved by smoking with aromatic woods than mutton. When once dried it will keep for six months. Mutton hams may be roasted or boiled; but in either case they should be soaked, unless quite freshly done, when they will only require washing. As a breakfast-dish, with eggs, mutton ham is commonly used in the north of England and in Scotland: it is cut in slices as required, and broiled lightly. Time to smoke, one week.
This is a dry-cure and cold-smoke procedure for a whole leg of mutton, and it sits outside what can be reproduced safely in a domestic kitchen today. The notes below explain the specific failure points rather than offering a revised method.
- Saltpetre out of rangeOne ounce of saltpetre (potassium nitrate) worked into a 12-14 lb leg works out to roughly 4,500-5,200 parts per million of nitrate by weight of meat, and far more in the surface layers where the rub actually sits. Modern regulated curing allows a fraction of that -- ingoing nitrite is held to the low hundreds of ppm, and nitrate for dry cures to well under 2,000 ppm -- and pre-blended cures are used precisely because eyeballing the dose is unsafe.
- No temperature is given anywhereSixteen days of turning and rubbing happens at whatever temperature the larder is. A cure this size depends entirely on the meat being held near or below 40F throughout; the recipe never says so, and a warm week in the middle of the cure gives spoilage and pathogenic bacteria a long head start on the salt penetrating to the bone.
- Cold smoking is not cookingA week in wood-smoke dries and flavours the surface but never brings the interior to a safe temperature. The finished ham is a raw, salt-preserved product whose safety rests wholly on the cure being correct — which, with unmeasured salt concentration and no brine testing, cannot be verified.
- Bone-in leg, deep cureA whole leg is the hardest cut to cure by rubbing alone. Salt has to travel several inches to reach the bone, and the tissue immediately around the femur is where a slow cure typically fails first. Commercial and careful modern practice pumps or injects brine along the bone for exactly this reason.
- "Bay salt" and "coarse brown sugar"Bay salt was coarse solar-evaporated sea salt; coarse brown sugar of the period was an unrefined, moist sugar closer to today's muscovado. Both are substitutable in principle, but neither substitution addresses the nitrate dose or the missing temperatures.
- "Keep for six months"That claim assumes a cool stone larder, a hanging airy space, and a household that would notice and discard a bad ham. It is not a shelf life you can rely on in a modern kitchen, and it should not be read as a guarantee that the cure was adequate.
- If you want mutton hamUse a current, tested curing recipe with weighed cure salts calculated against the exact weight of the meat, and a monitored temperature throughout. A small number of Scottish producers still make mutton ham.
Mutton ham — a leg of sheep cured and smoked in the manner of a pig's leg — is associated with the sheep-farming districts of northern England and Scotland, where mutton was abundant and pork less so; the recipe itself places it in the north of England and in Scotland. Comparable traditions of curing and drying a sheep's leg exist elsewhere, notably Norwegian fenalår and the cured mutton of the North Atlantic islands: the animal you actually keep gets treated with the technique reserved elsewhere for the animal you don't. A leg cured in autumn would help feed a household through the winter, sliced thin and broiled with eggs as the book describes. The instruction to cut the leg "into the form of a ham" may itself be part of the claim that this was a proper ham and not a substitute. Aromatic woods, and peat, were used for smoking in the north, and the writer's remark that no meat is more improved by it reads as a regional preference rather than a general culinary rule.