Home › Luncheon Dishes › Baked Ham with Pineapple
Baked Ham with Pineapple
1 Ham butt (5 or 6 lbs.) Bread crumbs 6 cloves Mrs. R. M. Dillon. 1 bay leaf 1 can sliced pineapple Cover ham with cold water, add cloves and bay leaf, bring to boiling, point. Reduce fire and cook gently, allowing 30 minutes to the pound. Lift ham out of liquid, peel off skin and rub surface with bread crumbs and brown sugar. Cover surface of ham with pineapple halves, fastened with toothpicks. Sprinkle pineapple with brown sugar. Bake in moderate oven until pineapple is brown and glazed-about one hour. Baste often.
A church-supper ham that assumes a raw or lightly cured joint of the kind sold at a butcher's counter in the 1920s. The one thing to check before you start is what kind of ham you actually have, because that decides everything about the timing.
- The hinge: is your ham raw or cooked?Most supermarket hams today are sold fully cooked and need only reheating to about 140F internal. The 30-minutes-to-the-pound simmer here suits a ham that has been cured but not cooked, the kind bought at a butcher's counter; applied to a modern ready-cooked ham it will dry it out. If you have an uncooked or dry-cured ham, cook to at least 145F internal on a thermometer rather than by the clock.
- "Ham butt"The upper, rounder end of the leg, bone in, 5 to 6 lb. The shank end works the same way and is easier to carve. Ask for a bone-in half ham.
- Moderate oven350F. The hour given is about right for browning and glazing, but a ham already at temperature from the pot will only need 30 to 40 minutes.
- Unmeasured brown sugarNo quantity is given. Figure on about 1/2 cup rubbed into the fat with the crumbs and another 1/4 cup sprinkled over the fruit.
- Bread crumbsDry, fine crumbs, not the coarse panko style. They are there to hold the sugar against the fat and form a crust; they will scorch if the oven runs hot.
- Pineapple "halves"Canned sliced pineapple cut into half-moons. One 20 oz can of rings is enough for a joint this size. Reserve the syrup.
- BastingThe recipe says baste often but names no liquid. Use the reserved pineapple syrup, thinned with a ladle of the cooking water, every 15 minutes.
- YieldA 5 to 6 lb bone-in ham serves 10 to 12 at a luncheon, and the leftovers are the point as much as the roast.
Baked ham studded with canned pineapple belongs to a specific moment: Hawaiian pineapple in tins was in production from the early 1900s, though its cheapness and ubiquity in American kitchens built through the 1910s and 1920s, and cooks put it everywhere a sweet-sour note was wanted against salt pork. A community cook book like this one is a good record of that shift, since the recipes are chosen for feeding a crowd on a predictable budget, and a canned good that keeps on the shelf all winter was worth more to a committee than fresh fruit. The two-stage method here, simmering then glazing, is older than the pineapple and was often used for hams that arrived from the butcher heavily salted and needed the brine drawn out in water before they saw an oven. Attributions like Mrs. R. M. Dillon's were the whole architecture of these books: each contributor gave her name with her dish, which suggests a volume assembled and sold by a local group to raise funds.