Pork: Cover
Cover the kraut with cold water, add a little salt if necessary, and place to boil three hours before using it. About an hour before it is done, put spareribs in and let them boil until the meat falls from the bones. Remove the spareribs, and stir in the kraut a grated raw potato from which the water has been drained. Let it come to a boil after this, being careful it does not burn; remove from stove, and serve.
To Boil a Ham.
Twenty-four hours before a ham is to be used, scrub it thoroughly with a vegetable brush and cold, weak borax water. Put in cold water and soak twenty-four hours. If it is to be baked, it requires four hours' boiling. Use a big kettle, as the ham must be covered all over with water.
Let it come to the boil very slowly.
Remove the scum. When it begins to boil, add 12 whole cloves, 1 bay leaf, 12 peppercorns, the outside stalks of 1 bunch celery, 2 chopped onions, 2 cloves garlic, 1 chopped carrot and turnip, 2 blades mace, 12 allspice berries, and 1 quart cider or a cupful vinegar. Never allow the ham to boil, merely simmer slowly; that is one secret of making it perfectly tender. Allow twenty-five minutes or half an hour to the pound. If the ham is to be used cold, you can add to its tender juiciness by allowing it to stand in the pot liquor till nearly cold. Then lift it out, peel off the skin and roll in dried bread crumbs with which 3 tablespoonfuls brown sugar have been sifted. Set it in the oven till the crumbs form a crisp brown crust. If the ham is to be baked, take it from the water, drain thoroughly, then take off the skin except around the shank, where it may be cut in vandykes with a sharp-pointed knife. Cover with crumbs and stick it full of cloves, set in a moderate oven, and bake two hours. If you prefer the ham glazed, allow it to cool as for boiled ham, then skin, wipe dry, and brush all PORK over with beaten egg. Mix 1 cupful sifted cracker crumbs, a dash salt and pepper, 2 tablespoonfuls melted butter, and cream enough to make crumbs into a paste. Spread it evenly over the ham, set in a moderate oven, and bake till brown; serve hot with brown sauce. When a baked or boiled ham goes to the table, wrap about the unsightly bone a ruffle of white tissue paper, and garnish with hard-boiled eggs cut in quarters.
Ham Steak.
Put slices of raw ham in a frying pan with cupful water to make them tender. When the water has boiled out and the ham is light brown on both sides, dust with flour and pour on the following dressing, previously made: A cupful milk and cream mixed, a little butter, a teaspoonful mustard, and a dash McIlhenny's Tabasco Sauce. As soon as it boils, serve.
Three separate pork preparations run together here: sauerkraut with spareribs, a boiled or baked ham, and a pan-fried ham steak. The instructions assume a heavily salt-cured, uncooked country ham, which is the main thing to reckon with before you start.
- Skip the boraxBorax was a standard household cleaner in this period and is not permitted as a food chemical now. Scrub the ham with a stiff brush and plain cold water instead; the step exists to remove surface mould and salt crust, and water does it.
- The ham this was written forA dry-cured, uncooked country ham needs the long soak and the long simmer to draw out salt and soften the meat. A modern supermarket ham labelled "fully cooked" needs neither, and 25 to 30 minutes to the pound followed by two hours of baking will reduce it to dry shreds. If you are working with a wet-cured ham, heat it through to about 140F and stop.
- Soak in the refrigeratorThe original leaves the ham in cold water for a full day. Do the soak in the refrigerator, changing the water two or three times, and use a raw country ham only if it is genuinely dry-cured.
- Simmer, never boilThis is the hinge of the recipe and the book is right to repeat it. Hold the water at 180-185F, with barely a tremble; a rolling boil tightens the muscle fibres and squeezes the ham dry no matter how long you cook it.
- Oven temperaturesA "moderate oven" is 350F. For the crumb crust on cold ham you want a hotter, shorter pass, around 400F for 15 to 20 minutes, just until the coating browns.
- Cider or vinegarOne quart of cider here means apple cider rather than sweet bottled juice; the recipe's alternative is simply "a cupful vinegar", with no type specified. Both are there to cut salt and help tenderise, not to flavour heavily.
- VandykesA vandyke is a row of zigzag or sawtooth cuts, the name traced to the painter Anthony van Dyck, whose portraits gave their name both to the deeply pointed lace collars and to the pointed beard. Here you cut them into the skin left around the shank end for decoration.
- Sauerkraut and spareribsThree hours of boiling suits old barrel kraut; drained modern jarred or bagged sauerkraut is milder and softer, and an hour to ninety minutes is plenty. The grated raw potato stirred in at the end is a thickener, and the warning about burning is real once the starch goes in, so stir and pull it off the heat quickly.
- Ham steak dressingA cup of milk and cream with mustard and Tabasco will break if it boils hard in the pan; bring it just to a simmer and serve. The named brand is not a period curiosity, Tabasco was already decades old when this book was printed.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantities. As a rough guide, a bone-in ham of 10 to 12 lb will serve fifteen or more, with plenty left for slicing cold; no amount of kraut or spareribs is specified.
Sauerkraut boiled with spareribs and thickened with grated raw potato is a Pennsylvania German dish above all others, eaten at New Year in that tradition, and it turns up in American household books of this period as a matter of course rather than as a regional novelty. The ham instructions belong to an older world in which a ham was a serious piece of preserved property: dry-salted, smoked, hung for months, and so salty that a full day's soak and a slow simmer in a spiced vegetable liquor were needed before it was edible. The borax scrub is a small window into the household of the period, when borax was sold in every grocery as a cleaner, laundry aid and general-purpose disinfectant and was applied to food surfaces without much thought; it has since been banned as a food additive in the United States, though a limited permitted use survives elsewhere. The tissue-paper frill tied round the shank bone, and the quartered hard-boiled eggs around the platter, show the same book worrying about the look of the table as much as the cooking.