Spiced Ham
Salt the hams for two days; put them in a keg and for each ham add: 1/2 cup molasses. 1 tablespoonful spice. 1 tablespoonful black pepper. A pinch of saltpetre. Let them stand four days, turning each day, then hang them up.--Mrs. D. R.
This is a dry-cure for whole raw pork legs, and it is one of the recipes in this book that cannot be reproduced safely. The points below explain what the instructions leave out rather than how to adapt them.
- No measured saltThe whole preservation of the ham depends on salt penetrating a 12-18 lb bone-in leg, and the recipe gives neither a weight of salt nor a ratio to the weight of meat. "Salt the hams for two days" is a note to a cook who already knew the household's practice; it carries no information a modern reader can act on.
- The cure is far too shortDry-curing a whole ham to the bone takes weeks, not six days, and the joint is thickest at the femur where spoilage organisms sit. Two days in salt plus four in molasses and spice leaves the interior essentially fresh meat.
- "A pinch of saltpetre"Potassium nitrate is the nitrate source that suppresses Clostridium botulinum during a long cure, and it is effective and safe only within a narrow measured range. A pinch is both unquantified and, for a ham of this size, almost certainly below any useful level while still being an unregulated dose of nitrate.
- No temperature anywhereCuring depends on holding the meat cold, in the region of 36-40F, for the whole period. A recipe of this kind presumably assumes an unheated meat house in cold weather, but it never says so; followed in a warm kitchen it is meat held at room temperature for the better part of a week.
- Hanging without smoke or a drying schedule"Then hang them up" omits what typically finished such hams: a period of cold smoking followed by extended drying. Hung wet, spiced and under-salted, a ham of this size spoils from the inside.
- The kegA wooden keg is hard to clean thoroughly and holds the sweet liquid that drains out of the meat.
- If you want to cure a hamUse a current recipe that specifies salt and cure by percentage of meat weight, a holding temperature, and a total cure time calculated from the thickness of the joint.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879) was assembled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housewives, which is why so many entries end in a set of initials rather than a signature, and why they read as reminders rather than instructions. Virginia ham was among the state's best-known products, and farm households with a smokehouse often had their own variant on the salt-and-molasses cure; sugar or molasses was there partly to soften the harshness of the salt and partly because a sweet cure was thought to give a better colour. Saltpetre had been used in meat curing in England and America for centuries before anyone understood that it was the nitrite formed from it, not the nitrate itself, that fixed the pink colour and held off spoilage. What the recipe assumes and never states is the season: hogs were killed after the first hard frosts, and the cure ran through the cold months, so the missing temperature control was simply the Virginia winter.