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Baked Ham
Soak the ham in cold water over night (old hams require two nights and a day).
After soaking, scrape well. Make a quart of flour into a very stiff paste and cover the entire skin side; place the ham perfectly level in a roasting pan and fill pan with cold water. Replenish occasionally with hot water while baking. For a seven to eight-pound ham bake about three and one-half hours; for one weighing eight to ten pounds four to five hours.
This assumes a whole dry-salt-cured country ham with the skin on — heavily salted, shelf-stable, and nothing like the wet-cured, fully cooked ham sold today. The flour paste is not a crust to eat; it is a disposable jacket that keeps the meat from drying out.
- The hinge: the soak is not optionalA dry-cured country ham carries enough salt to be inedible straight from the cure, and the overnight (or two-night) soak in cold water is what makes it food. Change the water two or three times. If you are working with a modern supermarket ham labelled "fully cooked" or "water added," skip the soak entirely — it has no salt to give up and will only go watery.
- No oven temperature is givenThe recipe never states a heat, and the book gives no oven term here to translate. The times quoted work out to roughly 30 minutes a pound, which in modern terms suggests a moderate oven, somewhere around 325F. Anything much hotter risks setting the flour paste hard before the interior warms through.
- The flour pasteA quart of flour is about 4 to 4½ cups; add water a little at a time until you have a stiff, non-sticky dough, closer to salt dough than pastry. Roll it out and drape it over the skin side about ½ inch thick. It bakes to a shell, is lifted off and discarded before serving, and takes much of the surface salt with it.
- Water in the panThe recipe has you lay the ham level and fill the pan with cold water, so it sits partly in the liquid and cooks in a mix of steam and shallow water; keeping it level is what stops the paste sliding off. As the text directs, replenish with hot water rather than cold while it bakes.
- Cook to temperature, not the clockModern hams vary in shape and starting temperature. A raw country ham should reach 145°F at the thickest point away from the bone; a previously cooked ham only needs 140°F to be hot through. The 3½- to 5-hour windows here are a reasonable guide but check with a thermometer.
- After the paste comes offPeriod practice was often to pull away the skin and score and glaze the fat - brown sugar, crumbs and mustard, or a stud of cloves - in a hot oven for a short finish. This recipe stops short of that step and says nothing about it.
- YieldA seven- to ten-pound bone-in ham serves roughly 14 to 20 at table, and country ham is sliced very thin, so plan on leftovers being the point rather than an accident.
Encasing meat in a stiff flour-and-water paste is one of the oldest roasting techniques in English cookery, and it is often linked to the medieval "coffin" — a pastry case made to be broken open, though whether such cases were eaten is disputed. By the time this was being printed, the huff paste survived mainly for hams, where its job was to hold in moisture through the very long baking a hard-cured leg required. The double-night soak tells you what sort of ham the writer had in mind: a farm-cured, salt-packed and often smoked ham, kept through the year without refrigeration, whose preservation depended on a level of salt that had to be leached out before eating. Commercial wet-curing and mechanical refrigeration made that ham a regional specialty rather than a household staple within a generation or two, and instructions like these gradually dropped out of general cookbooks.