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Virginia Mode of Curing Hams
Put one teaspoonful saltpetre on the fleshy side of each ham. Salt not too heavily for five weeks; if the weather is freezing cold, six weeks; then brush the hams well, and rub them with hickory ashes; let them lie for one week, then hang and smoke them for six weeks with green hickory chips. After brushing, pack them in hickory ashes in a bulk.--Mrs. P. C. M.
This is a dry-cure and cold-smoke procedure for whole pork legs, written for a Virginia farmhouse with a smokehouse and a reliable winter. It cannot be followed safely in a modern kitchen, and the notes below explain what is missing rather than how to fill the gaps.
- No measured cure"Salt not too heavily" is the whole of the salt instruction, and the only weighed ingredient is a teaspoon of saltpetre per ham. Safe dry-curing depends on a known weight of salt and a known weight of nitrite or nitrate per pound of meat; without those figures the cure is a guess, and an under-salted ham held for weeks at cellar temperature is exactly the anaerobic, low-acid environment in which Clostridium botulinum grows.
- Saltpetre is out of rangeSaltpetre is potassium nitrate. Modern curing uses precisely measured nitrite or nitrate blends because both the effective and the hazardous doses are small and close together. A teaspoon per ham, applied by hand to one face of the meat, gives no control over how much reaches the interior, which is where the risk sits.
- The whole method rests on the weatherThe instruction to extend the cure to six weeks "if the weather is freezing cold" implies the meat was held in an unheated meat house at winter temperatures, cold enough that the cure worked slowly. No temperature is given anywhere, and the recipe offers nothing for a warm winter.
- Cold smoke is not cookingSix weeks of green hickory chips is a cold smoke: it dries and flavours the surface and does nothing to bring the interior to a safe temperature. The resulting ham is a raw product, preserved only by whatever salt and nitrate happened to penetrate it, and the recipe never says to cook it before eating.
- Hickory ashesWood ash is strongly alkaline and was used as a physical barrier against flies and skippers, and to keep the surface dry. It is not a preservative in any measured sense, and it is not part of any current curing practice.
- "In a bulk"A bulk here is a stacked pile of hams, packed so they press on one another. The word appears in older Southern usage "to bulk down" meat, meaning to lay it up in a heap for the salt phase.
- If you want a country hamUse a current recipe from a source that specifies salt and cure weights per pound of meat, holding temperatures, and a target internal temperature. Read this page as a record of how it was done, not as a set of instructions.
Dry-cured, hickory-smoked hams were the pride of Virginia farm households, and the state's name is still attached to a style of ham; the technique came out of a subsistence pattern in which hogs were killed after the first hard freeze, the meat salted through the coldest weeks, and the hams hung to see the family through the following year. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879), compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by named Virginia housewives, prints several competing ham methods side by side, which is itself telling: curing was local, personal and argued over, and one might read each contributor's initials as standing for her warrant. The reliance on green hickory for smoke and hickory ashes for packing reflects what was simply to hand on a Virginia place. Recipes of this kind assumed knowledge that was never written down, passed instead from one season's work to the next, which is why the salt is measured in judgement rather than pounds.