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An Improvement to Hams
Sometimes very good bacon is found to be of a bad color when cooked. This may be remedied by keeping it in ashes (hickory is best) for a few weeks before using. Must then be hung up, with ashes adhering, until needed. This also prevents skippers.--Mrs. S. T.
TO BOIL A HAM WEIGHING TEN POUNDS.
Let it soak for twenty-four hours, changing the water two or three times. Boil it slowly eight or ten hours: when done, put it into a dish, as nearly as possible the shape of a ham, taking care first to take out the bone--turn the rind down. When cold, turn it out into a large dish, garnish with jelly and ornamental paper. Serve with the rind on. To be eaten cold.--Mrs. W. C. R.
Two contributions run together here: a storage hint for dry-cured bacon and Mrs. W. C. R.'s method for a boiled ham. Both assume a Virginia country ham — hard, dry, salt- and smoke-cured, hung for months — which behaves nothing like a modern wet-cured supermarket ham.
- Know which ham you haveThe times given only make sense for a raw, heavily salted dry-cured ham. A modern city ham is brine-injected and already fully cooked; soaking it for a day and boiling it for eight hours would leave you with salty threads. Buy an uncooked country ham if you want to follow this.
- The soak is not optionalA dry-cured ham carries enough salt to be inedible straight from the hook. Twenty-four hours in cold water with two or three changes is the minimum; keep it refrigerated or in a cold larder, not on the counter, while it soaks.
- "Boil it slowly" means do not boilHold the water at a bare simmer, barely shivering, for the whole time. The book gives no temperatures; a modern cook would read this as somewhere below a true boil, since a rolling boil tightens the muscle fibres and the ham turns stringy and dry no matter how long it cooks.
- Cook to temperature, not the clockEight to ten hours reflects a very hard, old-style cure rather than the weight alone. Go by an instant-read thermometer in the thickest part away from the bone: around 160F is a common target for country ham, and the shank bone should wiggle freely.
- Boning and mouldingThe bone is pulled out while the ham is still hot, and the meat is pressed skin-side down into a ham-shaped dish so it sets in one sliceable block as it cools. Any deep bowl or loaf pan will do; weight the top and chill overnight.
- The rind instruction is contradictoryThe rind instruction reads oddly at first -- The recipe says to turn the rind down in the mould and then to serve with the rind on; since the ham is turned out of the dish, the rind ends up uppermost, so the two directions in fact agree. Some cooks today prefer to peel the rind off after cooking and trim the fat back to a thin, even layer before pressing.
- Skippers and ashes"Skippers" are the larvae of the cheese skipper, Piophila casei, which lays on hanging cured meat; the maggots jump, hence the name. Ash presumably acted as a dry physical barrier against egg-laying. It is a hint for meat aged in an open smokehouse and has no use for ham kept wrapped in a refrigerator.
- YieldA ten-pound bone-in ham, boned, pressed and shaved thin in the Virginia manner, will serve twenty-five or more as a cold dish. It is meant for a sideboard, not a dinner plate.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (first published 1878), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia and neighbouring housekeepers, many of them signed only with initials, treats the cured ham as a centrepiece of the Virginia larder — hung in the household's own smokehouse and served cold for weeks. The two notes here belong to that world: hams were kept for many months in ambient air, where the skipper fly was a constant threat, and ash, pepper, or a cloth bag were among the defences used. Boiling, boning and pressing a ham into a mould so it could be shaved thin was the genteel treatment. What the "ornamental paper" consisted of is not specified — the bone has been taken out here, so the frill tied round an exposed shank bone cannot be what is meant. That the ham is served cold, jellied and garnished suits the period's sideboard entertaining, where a joint stood ready to be sliced for callers rather than carved at a set hour.