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Spanish Ham
The following is a Spanish cook's recipe for boiling a Spanish ham:--"Put the ham into cold water to soak for sixteen or eighteen hours; scrape and trim it well, putting it into cold water to simmer. Add to the water a tea-cupful of vinegar and a large tea-cupful of brown sugar; simmer five hours. A pint of sherry wine put into the water instead of the vinegar improves the flavour of the ham."
A method rather than a formula: a heavily salted dry-cured ham is soaked, then simmered in sweetened, acidulated water. The soak is the part that cannot be skipped, and the ham you buy today is probably not the ham the recipe means.
- The soak is the whole recipeSixteen to eighteen hours in cold water draws out the salt that made the ham keep without refrigeration. Change the water two or three times, and keep it in the refrigerator rather than on a counter. Skip or shorten the soak and the finished meat will be inedibly salty.
- What "Spanish ham" meant hereThis means a whole bone-in dry-salted leg intended to be cooked, closer to what a British book would call a gammon than to anything eaten raw. It is not modern jamon serrano or iberico, which is aged to be eaten raw in paper-thin slices and should never be boiled. Look for an American country ham, an uncooked bone-in gammon, or a salt-cured raw ham from a butcher.
- Teacupful and pintA Victorian teacup is roughly 5–6 fl oz, so a "large tea-cupful" of brown sugar is about three-quarters of a cup packed. The pint of sherry is an imperial pint, 20 fl oz, or two and a half US cups.
- Sugar and vinegar are not incidentalThe sugar softens the salty edge and the vinegar sharpens the cooking liquid; sherry does the same while adding the flavour the cook was after. Any dry or medium sherry works. Sweet cream sherry will push the cooking liquid toward syrup.
- Five hours is for a whole legA 12–16 lb bone-in ham genuinely takes that long. Judge by weight instead: roughly 20–25 minutes per pound, and confirm with a thermometer at 155–160F at the thickest point, away from the bone. A half ham or a 5 lb piece will be done in well under half the time.
- Keep it at a bare simmerStarting in cold water and bringing it up slowly keeps the muscle from seizing. A rolling boil for five hours will leave the outer inch dry and stringy while the centre is still tight. Look for a lazy shiver in the water, around 180F, and top up with boiling water so the ham stays covered.
- Cooling and finishingLet the ham cool in its liquid for an hour or two before lifting it out; it stays far juicier. The skin peels away easily while warm, and the fat can be scored, coated in more brown sugar or mustard, and browned in a 400F oven for 20 minutes if you want a glazed surface.
- YieldA whole bone-in leg feeds 20 or more, and is really a keeping joint: served hot the first day, then sliced cold for a week. The cooking liquid is too salty for stock unless heavily diluted.
This is a technique borrowed wholesale from another kitchen — the compiler simply quotes "a Spanish cook" and lets the method stand. Westphalian and York hams were the celebrated names of the period, and Victorian cookery writing is often said to have measured English bacon against such standards. The long presoak, the sugar and the vinegar all belong to a period when hams were salted hard enough to survive months in a larder without cold storage, and the cook's first job was to undo some of that salt. The suggestion of sherry in place of vinegar is the recipe's one flourish. Ham cooked whole this way was a standby of the cold table, carved for breakfasts, suppers and travelling baskets long after the hot joint had gone.