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York Ham, to Boil
Put the ham to soak in cold water for one or two days, according to its size and age. Place it in a stewpan with fresh water to cover it. Let it boil, and skim it. Add a carrot, an onion, a head of celery, and a bouquet garni. Boil the ham for as many quarter-hours as its weight is in pounds. When done, lift the saucepan from the fire, and let the ham cool in its liquor. Then take it out and remove the small bone of the leg, which should easily leave the flesh if it is well cooked. Keep the skin uppermost, so that the gravy can moisten the flesh, and not the top fat. Next day trim the ham neatly, remove the skin and the small bone of the chump end. Then turn it over and pass the finger between the skin and the fat, and pull the skin off. Dust over with bread raspings or glaze with aspic. Serve with a paper frill round the knuckle-bone.
This is written for a whole raw dry-cured ham, the kind that arrives hard, salty and uncooked. Almost everything sold as "ham" in a supermarket today is already brined and cooked, and needs none of this treatment.
- What a York ham isA dry-salt-cured, air-dried, unsmoked or barely smoked leg, sold raw and very salty on the bone. The closest things now are an uncooked gammon on the bone or an American country ham; a fully cooked bone-in ham should be reheated, not boiled from scratch.
- The soak matters mostOne to two days in cold water is what makes the finished ham edible rather than brutally salty, and it also softens the dried outer flesh. Do it in the refrigerator or a cool room below 40F, changing the water two or three times a day rather than leaving it standing.
- "Let it boil" once, then stopBring it up, skim, and then hold the water at a bare tremble, around 180-190F. A true rolling boil for hours shreds the outer inch of muscle and squeezes it dry while the centre is still cold.
- The timing, translatedA quarter-hour per pound gives 3 hours 45 minutes for a 15 lb ham. That is on the short side by modern reckoning for a raw cured leg; cook to an internal temperature of 150-160F at the thickest point, well clear of the bone, and use the weight rule only as an estimate.
- Cooling in the liquorThis is not idleness. The ham continues to cook as the pot falls, and reabsorbs liquid so it slices moist. Leave it until the water is merely warm, then refrigerate promptly if the kitchen is not cold; a large ham left overnight at room temperature sits too long in the danger zone.
- Skin uppermostThe point of the instruction is drainage. With the skin up, the juices settle down through the lean instead of pooling in the fat cap.
- Bread raspingsDried crusts baked until crisp and pale gold, then crushed to a fine sandy crumb. Ordinary fresh breadcrumbs will go pasty on the damp fat; oven-dry them first, or use fine dried crumbs toasted in a dry pan.
- Bouquet garni and vegetablesParsley stalks, thyme and a bay leaf tied together. One carrot, one onion and a head of celery is modest for a pot this size; double them if the ham weighs over 12 lb.
- YieldReckon on a pound of bone-in ham serving two to three people as a cold cut, so a 15 lb ham feeds a large gathering with plenty left. The cooking liquor is too salty for stock without heavy dilution, but it makes a good base for pea or lentil soup.
York ham was one of the recognised regional types of English cured bacon leg, cured dry with salt rather than in a wet pickle, then hung to dry for months, which gave it a pale pink flesh and a mild, dry, faintly nutty flavour quite unlike the sweeter Wiltshire cure. There is a trade legend that the hams were smoked with oak sawdust from work on York Minster, a story generally repeated and generally undocumented; what is certain is that by the later nineteenth century "York ham" was a quality designation used by grocers well beyond Yorkshire, the way "Cheddar" was. A boiled ham was a fixed point of the Victorian and Edwardian cold table: cooked a day ahead, trimmed and dressed with raspings or aspic, given its paper frill, and set out to be carved through a long succession of luncheons and suppers.