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Baked Ham with Jellied Vegetables
Soak eight pound ham in cold water over night, putting on to boil in the morning. Allow 20 minutes for each pound. Let ham cool in water in which it is cooked. When cool, take from water, removing rind, and rub with a mixture of cracker crumbs and orange marmalade. Bake in a moderate oven for 1 hour. Make vegetable jelly by adding fresh or canned vegetables to lemon jello. (A very good way to use up leftover canned fruits and vegetables.) Put to mold in individual molds. When hard, unmold on lettuce leaf. Serves 16.
Two dishes in one entry: a boiled-then-glazed ham and a set of individual gelatin salads to go beside it. The ham method assumes an old-style dry-salt country ham, which is why it begins with an overnight soak.
- Know which ham you haveThe overnight soak and the long boil are for a salt-cured, uncooked country ham. Nearly every supermarket ham today is wet-cured and sold fully cooked, needing neither soaking nor boiling — only reheating to about 140F before glazing.
- The 20-minute ruleTwenty minutes per pound gives 2 hours 40 minutes for an eight-pound ham, which is right for a raw salt-cured leg. Cook to an internal temperature of 145F at the thickest point rather than by the clock; a small dry-cured ham can reach that well before time is up.
- Cooling in the liquidThis is the step people skip and should not. Letting the ham cool in its cooking water keeps it moist and makes the rind peel away cleanly in one sheet, leaving the fat intact for the glaze.
- Moderate ovenConventionally reckoned somewhere around 350 to 375F; the recipe gives no figure. One hour at that heat is for a cold, already-cooked ham going in to warm through and set the crust; if the ham is still warm from the pot, 30 to 40 minutes is enough to brown the marmalade.
- The crumb glazeThe recipe does not specify the cracker; plain soda-cracker crumbs, finely rolled, suit it. Note that the recipe rubs on crumbs and marmalade already mixed together; warming the marmalade slightly helps the mixture spread. Watch the last 15 minutes — the sugar in marmalade scorches quickly.
- Lemon jelloOne 3-ounce package of lemon-flavored gelatin sets about 2 cups of liquid, so plan on two packages to fill sixteen small molds. Drain canned vegetables well and count their liquid as part of the water, or the jelly will not set.
- What not to put in the jellyFresh pineapple, kiwi, papaya and fresh figs contain enzymes that break gelatin down and it will never firm. Canned pineapple has been heated and is safe. Chill at least four hours, preferably overnight.
- YieldServes 16 as written, which works out at about half a pound of ham a head.
Jellied salads were the badge of a modern hostess in the 1920s and 1930s, when packaged flavored gelatin made in a few minutes what had once meant clarifying stock and boiling calves' feet. This entry shows the style at its most practical: the parenthetical note about using up leftover canned fruits and vegetables is the real argument for the dish, and the individual molds unmolded on a lettuce leaf gave each plate at the table a little architecture. Pairing the sweet-tart jelly with salt ham follows much older logic — the marmalade-and-crumb crust does the same job, cutting salt with sugar, as the brown-sugar and clove studding that home cooks were using at the same period. The overnight soak is the surviving trace of an era when a ham arrived heavily salted for keeping, not chilled and ready to slice.