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To Stuff Fresh Cured Ham
Boil the ham. Take one-half pound grated cracker or bread. 1/2 pound butter. 1 teaspoonful spice. 1 teaspoonful cloves. 1 teaspoonful nutmeg. 1 teaspoonful ginger. 1 teaspoonful mace. 3 spoonfuls sugar. Celery-seed or celery. 6 eggs, beaten light. 1 spoonful mustard.
Mix all well together and moisten with cream, if too stiff. Whilst the ham is hot, make holes to the bone and fill with this mixture. Put in the stove to brown.
A boiled Virginia cured ham, still hot, is bored to the bone and the holes packed with a rich spiced crumb-and-egg forcemeat, then finished in the oven. The mixture is very stiff and very heavily spiced by design, since it has to season a salty ham from the inside.
- Start with the ham itself"Fresh cured" here most likely means a recently cured country ham rather than a fresh (uncured) leg. A dry-cured country ham is usually soaked, often 12 to 24 hours in several changes of water, before the long simmer, or the finished dish will be very salty. A modern wet-cured or city ham needs no soaking and is usually sold already cooked.
- "Spice" means allspice"Spice" probably means allspice -- In nineteenth-century American receipts, "spice" listed alongside cloves, nutmeg, ginger and mace usually means ground allspice, though this recipe does not say so. Buy mace as blade or ground; it is the aril of nutmeg and is not interchangeable with more nutmeg in quantity.
- SpoonfulsUnqualified "spoonfuls" in receipts of this period generally mean tablespoons; the teaspoonfuls are stated as such. The mustard is most likely dry mustard powder rather than prepared mustard.
- Grated crackerPeriod crackers were typically hard and plain, close to a water biscuit, though salted and soda-leavened crackers also existed by 1878. Plain unsalted crackers or dry breadcrumbs both work; avoid seasoned or salted crumbs given how salty the ham already is.
- The butter is not a misprintHalf a pound of butter to half a pound of crumbs gives a paste, not a stuffing in the modern sense, and the recipe's own "moisten with cream, if too stiff" indicates a stiff mixture was expected. Add cream only a spoonful at a time; a loose mixture will run out of the holes.
- Making the holesWork while the ham is hot, when the meat gives. A long thin boning knife or a sharpening steel driven to the bone at intervals of two or three inches gives channels you can pack with the handle of a wooden spoon. Six to ten holes is plenty for a whole ham.
- "Put in the stove to brown"The stove means the oven of a cookstove. The recipe gives no temperature; a hot oven for 20 to 30 minutes will colour the surface. Because there are six eggs in the filling and the channels run deep, check with a thermometer that the stuffing in the centre of the ham has reached 165F before serving, not just that the outside has browned.
- YieldThe filling suits a whole bone-in ham of roughly 12 to 15 lb, which serves 20 or more. Halve it for a half ham. It slices well cold the next day, thin across the channels.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1878, gathered receipts from some 250 Virginia households, and ham runs through it as the state's defining product: the Smithfield and Tidewater trade in dry-cured hog was already old by the time the book appeared. Stuffed ham is a Chesapeake habit rather than a purely Virginian one; the better-known version, still made in St. Mary's County, Maryland, packs the slits with kale, cabbage and hot pepper. This one goes the other direction, toward the sweet-spiced English forcemeats of the eighteenth century, with cloves, mace, nutmeg and sugar bound with butter and egg. The pairing of heavy spicing with cured pork is generally traced to the older practice of masking, and complementing, the flavour of long-kept salt meat, and it survives today in the clove-studded, sugar-glazed holiday ham.