Boiled Ham
Select a medium-sized ham; soak over night in cold water. Clean and wipe; cover with cold water; bring to the boiling point, and then simmer until tender, allowing thirty minutes to the pound. Cool in water in which it was cooked. Take off the skin, sprinkle with sugar, and cover with seasoned cracker crumbs. Bake twenty to thirty minutes. Decorate with cloves, garnish with parsley and lemon, and serve hot or cold.
A more aromatic flavor is given to the ham if a bouquet of sweet herbs and one half cup each of onions, carrots, and turnips are boiled with it. Many baste the ham, when baking, with cider.
This is written for a dry-salt country ham, which is why it begins with an overnight soak. Almost every ham sold today is wet-cured and fully cooked, so most of the front half of the recipe no longer applies.
- Know which ham you haveThe overnight soak and the long simmer exist to draw salt out of a dry-cured, uncooked country ham. A supermarket ham labelled "fully cooked" needs neither; skip straight to skinning, sugaring, crumbing and baking.
- Thirty minutes to the pound is generousThat timing suits a heavily cured, bone-in ham of the period. For a raw cured ham today, count on 20 to 25 minutes per pound at a bare simmer and go by an instant-read thermometer rather than the clock: 145-150F at the thickest point, away from bone, before the bake.
- Simmer, do not boilThe recipe says bring to the boiling point, then simmer, and the distinction is the whole technique. A rolling boil tightens and shreds the muscle fibres; you want the water barely trembling.
- Cooling in the liquidNot an idle step. The ham reabsorbs liquid as it cools and stays far moister, and the skin peels off cleanly once the fat beneath has set. Cool it only until it can be handled comfortably rather than leaving it standing at room temperature for hours.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. A hot oven, somewhere around 400F, will set the crumbs and catch some colour in twenty to thirty minutes without drying meat that is already cooked; the figure is an inference, as the book offers no guidance here.
- Seasoned cracker crumbsThe seasoning is not specified; crushed soda or water crackers with pepper and perhaps mustard would fit the period. Fine dry breadcrumbs behave the same way. Note that the recipe sprinkles the sugar on the ham first and then covers it with the crumbs.
- The vegetables and herbsOnions, carrots, turnips and a herb bouquet flavour the ham only lightly. The greater prize is the cooking liquid, which makes excellent pea or bean soup, provided the ham was not so salty that you must dilute it.
- YieldThe book does not define 'medium-sized', but a bone-in ham of the period would run roughly 8 to 12 lb, serving fifteen to twenty-five with plenty left for cold slicing the next day.
Lowney's Cook Book was compiled by Maria Willett Howard and published in 1907 by the Walter M. Lowney Company, the Boston chocolate manufacturer, and though it is remembered for its chocolate work it carries a full complement of ordinary American household cookery like this. The method here belongs to a dry-cure tradition that ran parallel to the commercial brine curing long established in American packing houses: hams were packed in dry salt and saltpetre and hung for months, so the overnight soak and the long simmer in fresh water were not fussiness but necessity, drawing out enough salt to make the meat palatable. Finishing a boiled ham in the oven under sugar and crumbs is an English inheritance that took firm root in New England, and the clove decoration is purely ornamental here, since the cloves go in after cooking. Cider basting points to the same regional kitchen.