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Westphalian Ham, Mock
Hams may be cured at home in such a way that they will acquire something of the flavour which belongs to Westphalian hams. To do this, rub each ham with one ounce and a half of pounded saltpetre and one ounce and a half of moist sugar. Let the meat lie for twenty-four hours. Put a pound of strong, stale beer into a stewpan with a pound of common salt, a pound of bay salt, half a pound of brown sugar, one ounce of black pepper, and one ounce of pounded cloves. Let the liquor boil, skim it, and pour it boiling hot upon the ham, which should be turned and rubbed in it twice a day for a fortnight. Or make the pickle by boiling two gallons of soft water with two pounds of common salt, two ounces of bay salt, two ounces of saltpetre, and a handful of bay-leaves finely shredded. Pour the boiling liquor upon the ham, and turn and rub it every day as before. Burn juniper wood under the hams when smoking them. The Westphalian hams derive their peculiar flavour not from the way in which they are cured and smoked alone: the peculiar nature of the food of the Wesphalian pigs has a great deal to do with it.
This is a home curing formula from the era before anyone measured nitrate in parts per million, and it cannot be followed safely as printed. The notes below explain the terms and the specific gaps.
- No weight of meat is givenThe whole formula hangs on the size of the ham, and the recipe never states one. An ounce and a half of saltpetre is a wildly different dose on a 6 lb ham than on an 18 lb one, and there is no way to reconstruct the intended concentration.
- Saltpetre out of rangeSaltpetre is potassium nitrate. Modern curing uses nitrite and nitrate at strictly controlled levels because excess nitrate is toxic and the margin is not large. Two ounces in the second brine, on top of the ounce and a half rubbed on beforehand, applied to an unspecified piece of meat, is outside any measurable range.
- Curing time cannot carry the salt inA fortnight in brine, or a day in dry cure, is short for a bone-in ham. An undercured centre held at cellar temperature is exactly the anaerobic, low-acid, low-salt condition that Clostridium botulinum exploits, which is why nitrate is specified in modern cures; the writers of this period used it without knowing the organism.
- Temperature is never mentionedCuring must happen under refrigeration, and the recipe simply says to let the meat lie and be turned. Boiling pickle poured over raw pork also warms the surface into the danger zone before it cools.
- Cold smoking over juniperSmoking a cured ham is done below the temperature that cooks it, so the smoke does little pathogen killing beyond the surface. It works only when the cure beneath it has been done to a verified specification. If you want to cure ham at home, work from a current recipe with stated meat weights, cure percentages and holding temperatures.
- Bay saltNot bay leaves. Bay salt is coarse solar-evaporated sea salt, less refined and greyer than table salt; the name is usually explained as a reference to the Bay of Biscay, though that derivation is traditional rather than established.
- Moist sugar and soft waterMoist sugar is unrefined or partly refined cane sugar with the molasses still in it, close to a light brown sugar. Soft water is simply water low in dissolved minerals; rainwater was one household source.
- Strong, stale beerStale here means aged and matured rather than spoiled, and strong means high in gravity. The recipe does not specify a style.
Westphalian ham is the smoked, bone-in raw ham of western Germany, and its reputation in Victorian Britain was for a dense, dark, nutty flavour that English cures did not match. The final sentence of this entry is the honest one: the classic account holds that Westphalian pigs foraged in the region's beech and oak forests, and the mast-fed fat was credited with much of the character, with juniper smoke doing the rest. That combination is what a home cook could not reproduce, hence "mock". Books of this kind carry many such approximations to famous imported foods, written for a household that wanted a version made from an ordinary English ham. It also belongs to a period when curing was passing out of the domestic kitchen and into the hands of commercial bacon factories.