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Baked Virginia Ham
I Virginia ham A few cloves 1/2 pint (I cup) sherry wine Brown sugar Wash the ham and place it in cold water; let it soak for twelve hours, then put it into fresh cold water and let it soak for another twelve hours. When ready to cook, place it skin down in a large casserole, which must be of good size and full of cold water. It will take about one hour, over a moderate fire, to come to boiling point.
Then keep it boiling steadily-on no account must it be allowed to boil fast-and as the water boils down replenish with hot, never with cold, water, so as not to check the boiling.
When the ham is done it will, on its own accord, turn over skin up. This is sufficient proof of its being thoroughly cooked without further test. Let it cool in the liquor in which it was cooked. Take it out, gash the entire top, having the gashes about half an inch apart. Stick cloves in the gashes, sprinkle thickly with brown sugar, and pour over all the sherry wine.
Lay the ham in a fireproof dish and bake till brown.
This is a whole dry-cured country ham, not the pink wet-cured ham sold in supermarkets, and almost every instruction in the recipe follows from that. The two-day soak is not optional softening — it is desalting, and skipping it makes the meat close to inedible.
- What "casserole" means hereHere a casserole is the vessel on the stove, not a baked dish: the recipe sends the ham to a separate "fireproof dish" only for the final browning. Use the largest stockpot or canning kettle you own, deep enough to keep the ham fully submerged throughout.
- The ham itselfA Virginia or Smithfield ham is salt-cured, often smoked, and aged for months; it arrives hard, dark and sometimes mouldy on the surface, which is scrubbed off before soaking. A supermarket cooked ham needs none of this treatment and will fall apart if boiled for hours.
- The 24-hour soakTwo changes of cold water over twenty-four hours is the minimum for a properly aged ham. Do the soaking in the refrigerator or in a cold place rather than at room temperature, changing the water as directed.
- Simmer, never boilThe instruction not to let it boil fast is the hinge of the recipe. Hold the water at a bare shiver, around 180-190F; a rolling boil tightens the muscle fibres and gives you dry, stringy meat. Reckon roughly 20-25 minutes per pound, so four to six hours for a large ham.
- The turning-over testA ham rolling skin-up as the fat renders is a genuine old kitchen sign, but it is not reliable enough to depend on alone. Check that the meat is at 160F at the thickest point, away from the bone, and that the small bone at the hock end pulls free easily.
- Cooling in the liquorLetting it cool in its cooking water keeps it moist and makes the skin easy to peel. Because a whole ham holds heat for hours, get the pot into a cold place promptly rather than leaving it out overnight in a warm kitchen.
- Skin and scoringThe recipe asks only for gashes about half an inch apart with cloves stuck into them; it says nothing about the skin. In practice the skin lifts away easily after cooling in the liquor, and the cuts are conventionally taken through the fat rather than deep into the meat.
- Half a pint of sherryThe book's own gloss, one cup, is the American half-pint. Use a dry or medium sherry; cream sherry with the brown sugar makes the glaze cloying.
- The final bake"Bake till brown" gives no temperature, and the book supplies none. A fairly hot oven for twenty to thirty minutes, basting with the pan syrup once or twice, will do it. The ham is already cooked, so this step is colour and glaze only.
- Yield and servingA whole country ham serves a large gathering, since it is meant to be carved cold in near-transparent slices and the salt keeps portions small; leftovers keep for several days well wrapped in the refrigerator.
Virginia ham belongs to a Southern curing tradition that predates refrigeration: hogs killed in cold weather, packed in salt, hung in a smokehouse and aged through the following summer, producing a hard, intensely salty, deeply flavoured meat closer to prosciutto or Spanish jamón than to modern boiled ham. The most famous version comes from Smithfield in Isle of Wight County, and Virginia law has long restricted the label "Smithfield ham" to hams processed within the town. The peanut-fed hog is the detail most often cited in accounts of why the fat tasted distinctive, though the practice had largely faded by the mid-twentieth century. The recipe's appearance in a casserole-cookery book is a reminder of how these volumes actually worked: a heavy lidded pot on the range did the long, slow, unattended work, and the oven was called in only at the end for browning. The sherry-and-brown-sugar glaze, poured over cloved gashes, is the standard festive finish of the period, and it survives almost unchanged on American holiday tables.