Ham
Good, boiled; better, baked ; best of all, roasted.
But roast ham is rare because it is difficult; baked ham is easier, and boiled easiest of all.
Boiled Ham.-Soak an English ham for twenty-four, a Spanish one forty-eight hours. Scrape it and cleanse it carefully. Boil it or braze it in liquor and seasoning enough to cover it. For very simple tastes water alone is used, Ham together with carrots, onions, celery, cloves, mace, thyme and bayleaves. For a very fine ham use a Mirepoix into which about a pint of wine enters, and add broth to make up the remainder of the liquor. For something between these two take a quart of old cider, together with carrots, onions, and a faggot of sweet-herbs, using water for whatever else of liquor may be required. Simmer it or braze it very slowly indeed for four or five hours, according to size. Then lift it out of its pan-take off the rind and let it dry for a minute or two in the oven after which it is to be trimmed, and it may be either glazed in the French fashion, or in English fashion strewed with raspings. If the ham is to be served cold let it cool in its liquor, then remove the rind, trim it, cover it either with glaze or with raspings, and garnish it with aspic jelly and picked parsley.
Baked Ham.-Prepare the ham as above, and let it simmer slowly for an hour in plain water. Then put it in a large baking-dish, with Mirepoix of wine and a little stock. Cover it over with oiled paper, and that again with a plain flour-and-water paste as for a meat pie. Put it in a slow oven to bake for three or four hours, according to size, and adding moisture if need be. Finish as before. Roast Ham. Soak the ham, cleanse it, trim it, and simmer it for an hour slowly in plain water. Then let it soak for twenty-four hours in a Mirepoix of red wine, turning it occasionally. It is afterwards to be removed from the Mirepoix and wrapt up like a haunch of venison first with oiled paper, then with water paste, then with another wrapping of paper tied with a string. Put it into a cradle-spit, and with much basting roast it for three or four hours, according to size, before a moderate fire. Finish the ham as before, and serve it with a boatful of gravy made of the Mirepoix liquor which has been used in basting it.
Hare
Three methods for a whole bone-in ham, written when hams came from the grocer heavily salted and needed a day or two of soaking before they were fit to cook. Almost everything here still works; the salt arithmetic is what has changed.
- Soaking is now usually unnecessaryThe 24- and 48-hour soaks assume a dry-salt-cured ham of the 1870s. A modern wet-cured or brine-injected ham needs no soaking at all, and a country ham or genuine long-cured ham needs 12-24 hours with two or three changes of cold water, refrigerated throughout. If unsure of the salt level, poach a small sliver and taste that rather than the raw meat.
- "Spanish ham" means something else todayKettner is describing a hard, heavily salted export ham meant for cooking. What is sold now as Spanish ham -- jamón serrano or ibérico -- is fully cured and eaten raw in thin slices; boiling it for five hours would be an expensive mistake.
- Mirepoix in this book is a liquidKettner uses Mirepoix in the older sense: a braising bath of wine or cider with diced carrot, onion and celery, herbs and a little fat or stock, not the dry vegetable dice the word now means. Read "a Mirepoix of red wine" as "a wine-based braising liquor with aromatics".
- Faggot of sweet-herbs and raspingsA faggot of sweet-herbs is a bouquet garni -- parsley, thyme, bay tied with string. Raspings are dried breadcrumbs made from oven-hardened crusts, rubbed through a sieve and patted over the fat in place of a glaze.
- Oven temperatureA slow oven for the baked ham is roughly 300F/150C. The 'moderate fire' for the roast is an open hearth rather than an oven, so no exact temperature equivalent can be given; treat it as a moderate roasting heat, with the 'much basting' the recipe calls for.
- The flour-and-water pasteThis is huff paste: a stiff flour-water dough used as an edible-adjacent insulating jacket, wrapped over oiled paper. It is discarded, not eaten. Its job is to hold moisture in over three or four hours; a double sheet of parchment inside heavy foil does the same work.
- The instruction that matters mostSimmer, never boil. A ham held at a rolling boil for four hours goes stringy and dry however good the liquor is; keep the surface barely trembling at 180-185F/82-85C. Cook by internal temperature rather than the clock -- current guidance for an uncooked cured ham is 145F/63C at the thickest point, away from the bone, with a rest, though many cooks still take a whole ham nearer 160F/71C.
- Timing and sizeKettner gives no weight, only 'according to size'. Four or five hours implies a whole bone-in ham, enough for a large table; a smaller half ham will need proportionally less time, and the baked version likewise.
- Serving coldLetting the ham cool in its own liquor is sound practice and worth following -- it reabsorbs moisture and salt evenly. Cool it to room temperature no longer than two hours, then refrigerate in the liquor. The aspic garnish is period dressing and can be left off without loss.
Kettner's Book of the Table (1877) was written by the journalist E. S. Dallas, borrowing the name of Auguste Kettner, the Soho restaurateur said to have cooked for Napoleon III; the book is a dictionary of dishes arranged alphabetically, which is why "Ham" sits between other H entries with no menu around it. The ranking that opens the entry -- boiled good, baked better, roast best -- reflects a Victorian hierarchy of effort as much as of flavour: roasting a whole ham on a cradle spit before an open fire, basting it for hours, was a display of kitchen labour that only a large staffed household or a restaurant could attempt, and Dallas concedes as much when he calls it rare because it is difficult. The long soaking times are the clearest marker of the period. Before reliable refrigeration and the mild pumped cures of the twentieth century, a ham was preserved with enough salt to survive months of storage and shipping, and the cook's first task was to take much of that salt back out again.