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Stuffed Ham
Take a well-smoked ham and boil it till it is about half done. Let it get cold and skin it. Then get a good parcel of cabbage sprouts, a handful of parsley, a small piece of stale bread, and chop them all up together, with plenty of black pepper. Make gashes in the ham with a sharp knife about an inch apart from the hock down clear across the ham and then stuff it to the bone. Bake till done, say an hour or two.-Margaret Sutton Briscoe.
This is the Southern Maryland stuffed ham in its earliest, loosest form: a half-boiled smoked ham slashed to the bone, packed with greens, and finished in the oven. The instructions assume a whole bone-in country ham and a cook who knows what "done" looks like.
- The hinge: cut deep, stuff tightThe gashes must go all the way to the bone and the stuffing must be forced right into them, or the greens sit on the surface and slide off in carving. Work with your fingers and the handle of a wooden spoon, and pack until the slits bulge.
- What ham this meansA "well-smoked ham" in a collection of this period means a dry-salt-cured, uncooked country ham, bone in, skin on (the recipe has you skin it after boiling), typically somewhere between 10 and 20 lb. Most supermarket hams today are wet-cured and sold fully cooked, so the initial boiling is unnecessary; if you use a genuine country ham, soak it overnight first and change the water, or the finished dish will be punishingly salty.
- "Half done" by the numbersFor a raw country ham, simmer at a bare bubble roughly 10 minutes per pound, to an internal temperature around 120-130F. It should be firm and sliceable but not yet tender. Cooling it completely is not optional: a warm ham tears rather than slits.
- Cabbage sproutsMost likely the loose leafy shoots of overwintered cabbage or kale rather than Brussels sprouts. Curly kale, collards or spring greens are the usual modern substitutes. The recipe gives no quantity beyond "a good parcel", so judge by the ham: enough to fill every slit, wilted, squeezed dry and chopped fine with the parsley and the stale bread.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Bake at 325F, covered or wrapped, allowing 15-20 minutes per pound after the boil, and take the ham to an internal temperature of 145-150F. "An hour or two" is short for a whole ham and assumes it was already close to cooked.
- Keep the stuffing inTraditional practice is to tie the stuffed ham in cheesecloth or a clean cloth before the final cooking, which holds the slits shut and stops the greens washing out. Older versions return the ham to the pot rather than the oven; either way the cloth is worth using.
- ServingA whole stuffed ham feeds 20 or more and is meant for a crowd. Slice it cold or barely warm, thin and straight down across the gashes, so every slice carries a band of green.
Stuffed ham is the signature dish of St. Mary's County, Maryland, where it still appears at Easter, church suppers and Thanksgiving, and where the greens are traditionally kale and cabbage cut with mustard seed and hot pepper. Its origin is generally traced to the kitchens of Southern Maryland plantations and credited to the cooks enslaved there, who are said to have stretched and seasoned a cured ham with the winter greens at hand; the documentary trail is thin and the story is traditional rather than proven. What makes this version interesting is its author: Margaret Sutton Briscoe was a writer of the period, and her contribution reads like a family method dictated from memory rather than a tested formula, with a "good parcel" of sprouts and a bake of "an hour or two." It is also a reminder of how a smoked ham functioned in a household before refrigeration, as a large, salty, long-keeping asset served cold over many days.