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Stuffed and Baked Ham
After your ham is boiled, take the skin off. Take pepper, all-spice, cloves and mace, well pounded; add a little bread crumbs, and a little brown sugar; mix with a little butter and water.
Gash your ham and take out plugs; fill in with the mixture. Rub the ham with an egg beaten, and grate on bread crumbs and white sugar. Put in the oven and brown.--Mrs. D. R.
A short set of directions that assumes a whole boiled country ham on the sideboard and a cook who knows what a spice paste should look like. The measurements are all left to judgment, so the notes below give workable proportions and the oven detail the original omits.
- The hinge: cut real pockets, not slashes"Gash your ham and take out plugs" means coring out plugs of meat an inch or so deep and wide across the fat side, not scoring the surface in a diamond pattern. The stuffing has to sit inside the meat to perfume it; shallow cuts simply shed the paste into the pan.
- Working proportionsFor a 12-15 lb ham, figure roughly 1 cup dry breadcrumbs, 1/3 cup brown sugar, 4 tablespoons softened butter, and about 2 teaspoons total of the mixed pepper, allspice, clove and mace, with clove and mace kept to the smaller share. Add water a spoonful at a time until the mixture packs like damp stuffing.
- MaceThe lacy outer covering of the nutmeg, sold ground or as blades. Ground nutmeg is the nearest substitute, though it is sweeter and less peppery, so use it sparingly.
- Oven heatThe recipe gives none. A hot oven, around 400-425F, for 20-30 minutes is a workable modern reading of "put in the oven and brown" -- the meat is already cooked, so this is purely a glazing step. Watch the sugar crust, which will darken fast once it takes color.
- The crustThe beaten egg is glue. Brush it over the whole surface, then press on a mixture of fine dry breadcrumbs and white sugar; it sets into a thin sweet shell rather than a wet glaze. It will not survive long standing, so brown it close to serving.
- Boiling the ham firstA period Virginia ham was dry-salt-cured and hard, needing a long soak (12-24 hours, water changed) before several hours of gentle simmering, roughly 20 minutes per pound, until the shank bone loosens. A modern supermarket "city ham" is wet-cured and already fully cooked; skip the boil and go straight to skinning, stuffing and browning.
- Skin and fatPeel the skin off while the ham is still warm, when it lifts cleanly, and leave a quarter-inch of fat behind. That fat is what carries the spice and keeps the crumb coating from scorching.
- Yield and servingA whole ham of this kind serves 20 or more, and Virginia hams were commonly carved in thin slices across the grain, in which the stuffed pockets show as dark spots in each piece.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housekeepers, treats ham less as a dish than as an institution: the cured hind leg was the fixed point of the Tidewater and Piedmont larder, put down in salt in cold weather and hung to age for months. Baking a ham that has already been boiled, then studding it with a spiced crumb paste and finishing it under a sugared crust, is the celebration version "a way of turning a preserved staple into something fit for a Christmas or wedding table. The clove-allspice-mace combination is the same warm-spice register used in period mincemeat and plum pudding, and reflects an older English tradition in which sweet and salt were not kept apart. The initials "Mrs. D. R." are typical of the book's method: recipes were solicited from real households, which is why quantities are so often left to the cook's own hand.