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For Curing Hams
For five hundred pounds hams. 1 peck and 1 1/2 gallons fine Liverpool salt. 1 3/4 pounds saltpetre. 1 quart hickory ashes well sifted. 1 quart molasses. 2 teacups cayenne pepper. 1 teacup black pepper.
Mix these ingredients well together in a large tub, rub it into each ham with a brick, or something rough to get it in well. Pack in a tight, clean tub and weigh down. Let the hams remain six weeks, then take them out and rub each one on the fleshy side with one tablespoonful black pepper to avoid skippers. Hang in the meat house, and smoke with green hickory for from ten to twelve hours a day for six weeks, not suffering the wood to blaze. On the 1st of April, take them down and pack in any coal ashes or pine ashes well slaked. Strong ashes will rot into the meat.--Mrs. R. M.
This is a full farm-scale dry cure for a winter's killing, written for a Virginia meat house and an unheated smoke house. It is worth reading as a document, but every control that makes modern curing safe is absent from it.
- No temperature is given anywhereDry curing depends on holding the meat between roughly 36F and 40F for the whole six weeks of salting, and on cold smoke that never warms the meat into the danger zone. The recipe assumes a Virginia winter and an outbuilding; it gives no reading to work to, and a warm spell mid-cure spoils the interior of a ham long before anything is visible outside.
- The saltpetre is unmeasurable in practice1 3/4 lb of potassium nitrate spread by hand across 500 lb of hams gives no reliable dose to any one ham. Some pieces get far more nitrate than current limits allow, others get too little to inhibit Clostridium botulinum in the deep muscle. Modern practice uses a premixed cure at a stated percentage of the meat's weight for exactly this reason.
- Nitrate is not nitriteSaltpetre works only when bacteria in the meat slowly reduce it to nitrite. That conversion depends on temperature, salt level and the flora present, none of which are controlled here. This is why commercial slow cures now use a measured nitrate/nitrite blend rather than raw saltpetre.
- Hickory ashes are a lye sourceWood ash is strongly alkaline. The recipe's closing line, "strong ashes will rot into the meat," refers to the coal or pine ashes the hams are packed in at the end rather than to the hickory ashes in the rub, but it shows the alkali was known to attack the meat. Ash was commonly used as a cheap insect and mould barrier as well as being mixed into the cure here, and it carries whatever the fire carried.
- "Skippers" means cheese skipper larvaePiophila casei lays in hanging hams and its larvae tunnel through the meat. A tablespoon of black pepper rubbed on the cut face was the old defence; it is not a reliable one, and infestation is one reason country hams were bagged and ashed.
- The archaic measures, for readingA peck is 8 dry quarts, or 2 dry gallons, so the salt comes to roughly 3 1/2 gallons in all. Liverpool salt was coarse salt shipped from Liverpool, largely made from Cheshire brine, and sold under that name through the nineteenth century. A teacup was an informal measure, usually reckoned somewhere between a half and three-quarters of a modern cup.
- The calendar is the real instructionThe only date the recipe fixes is the 1st of April, when the hams come down; six weeks of salting and six weeks of smoking place the work in the cold months, after the usual winter killing. Everything in the method is timed to cold weather rather than to a thermometer.
- If you want to cure a hamUse a current, tested dry-cure procedure with weighed cure, a stated percentage of salt to meat, and monitored temperature throughout. Do not scale this text down.
Virginia's country ham — salted, hickory-smoked, then hung to age through the summer — was already an export by the eighteenth century, with Smithfield the name that stuck to it. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (most commonly dated 1878) was assembled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by named and initialled Virginia housekeepers, which is why this reads as one woman's household practice rather than a standard: "Mrs. R. M." is giving the proportions that worked on her place, for a hog-killing that produced 500 lb of hams at once. The cayenne and black pepper, the ash packing and the pepper rub on the fleshy side season the meat and also work against insects, and the fixed date of the 1st of April marks the point when Virginia weather turns and the meat house stops being a refrigerator.