To Boil Ham
Put in the water one pint vinegar, a bay leaf, a little thyme, and parsley. Boil slowly for two hours, if it weighs ten pounds; then bake. Soak all hams twenty-four hours before cooking.--Mrs. M.
To Boil Ham.
The day before you wish to boil a ham, scrape, wash and wipe it dry, and put it in the sun. At night put it into water and soak till next morning. Then lay it with the skin down in a boiler of cold water, and boil slowly for five hours. If the ham is large, boil six hours. When perfectly done and tender, set the boiler aside, with the ham and liquor undisturbed, until cold. Then take off the skin, sprinkle black pepper over thickly, and sift over crackers first browned and pounded; for special occasions, place at equal distances over the ham, scraped horseradish in lozenge shape, and edged with curled parsley. This mode keeps the ham juicy.--Mrs. S. T.
Two contributed methods for the same job, printed one after the other: Mrs. M.'s brief boil-then-bake, and Mrs. S. T.'s long boil with a crumbed finish. Both assume a dry-salt-cured, smoked Virginia country ham, not the wet-cured supermarket product.
- The ham itselfA modern "city ham" is brine-injected, mild and already fully cooked; soaking and five hours of boiling would reduce it to threads. These directions only make sense for a whole uncooked country ham (Smithfield-style), which arrives hard, dark and mould-flecked and must be scrubbed and soaked before it is edible.
- Why the soak matters mostThe twenty-four-hour soak is the hinge of the whole thing. A dry-cured ham can carry enough salt to be inedible straight from the cellar; skipping or shortening the soak, or failing to change the water, gives meat no amount of boiling will rescue.
- "Boil slowly" means simmerWater at a true rolling boil toughens and shreds the muscle. Hold it at a bare shiver, around 180-190F, with the surface barely moving. Country hams are traditionally judged done when the small bone at the hock pulls free easily; a thermometer reading of about 160F in the thickest part is the modern check.
- TimingFive to six hours suits a 12-16 lb whole ham, roughly 20-25 minutes per pound. Mrs. M.'s two hours for ten pounds is a par-boil only, which is why her ham then goes into the oven to finish; she gives no oven heat, so treat it as moderate, 350F, until the interior reaches temperature.
- Cooling in the liquorLeaving the ham in its cooking water until cold does keep it moist, but a whole ham left in warm water sits in the bacterial danger zone for hours. Let it cool on the counter no more than about two hours, then move pot and all to the refrigerator, or lift the ham out and chill it once it has stopped steaming.
- Browned crackersNineteenth-century soda or water crackers, toasted in the oven until deep tan and crushed fine. Coarse dry breadcrumbs toasted the same way are the nearest thing; press them onto the fat after the skin is stripped, leaving the pepper beneath.
- Vinegar and herbsOne pint is about two cups. The bay, thyme and parsley amount to a modest court-bouillon of a kind used for large boiled meats; what the vinegar contributes at that dilution is hard to say.
- ServingCountry ham is sliced very thin rather than in the thick cuts given to a wet-cured ham, and is often served cold. A whole ham may serve twenty-five or more this way and keeps, wrapped, for a week or two under refrigeration.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1878), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree, was assembled from recipes sent in by Virginia housekeepers, which is why the same dish appears twice over with different initials attached and no attempt to reconcile them. The book carries a good many ham recipes: the Virginia and Carolina practice of dry-salting, smoking and then ageing a hog's hind leg for months produced a hard, intensely salty keeping meat, the whole point of which was that it survived a summer without ice. Sunning the scraped ham, as Mrs. S. T. directs, was said to dry and sweeten the surface before the long soak. The horseradish lozenges and curled parsley belong to the late-Victorian taste for a decorated cold joint on the sideboard, where a ham might be sliced from over several days rather than served all at once.