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Cottage Ham
Rub cottage ham, weighing 3 to 4 1/2 lbs., with 1/4 cup brown sugar, 1 teaspoon prepared mustard; stick surface well with cloves. Place in baking pan, sear in hot (450 degrees) oven 20 minutes. Reduce heat to slow oven (275 degrees), bake 3 hours. Serve with horseradish sauce. Serves six to eight.
A 1930s treatment of a cured pork shoulder, with the oven temperatures spelled out — unusually helpful for its era. The main thing worth updating is the total time, which predates the meat thermometer.
- What a cottage ham isNot a ham at all but a boneless, cured and lightly smoked pork shoulder butt, sold as smoked shoulder butt or cottage butt (and, in Canada, as cottage roll). If your market has none, a small boneless smoked picnic shoulder behaves the same way; a modern spiral-cut ham does not, being already fully cooked and much leaner.
- Cook to temperature, not to the clockThree hours at 275F will take a 3 lb cured shoulder well past 180F and dry it out. Roast until the center reads 145F for a cut labeled ready-to-cook, or 140F for one labeled fully cooked — usually 1 1/2 to 2 hours after the initial sear for a piece this size.
- The searing stepTwenty minutes at 450F sets the sugar rub into a glaze before the long, low bake. Watch it: brown sugar over a cured surface can scorch in the last few minutes, and a scorched glaze turns bitter.
- SaltCottage hams are often heavily brined. Check the label sodium; if it is very salty, cover with cold water and simmer 20 minutes, then drain before rubbing and roasting.
- Cloves"Stick the surface well" meant whole cloves pushed into the fat, roughly an inch apart — about 20 to 30 for a piece this size. Score the surface in a diamond pattern first so they anchor, and remove them before slicing.
- Keep it from dryingThe original gives no liquid or cover. A half cup of water or cider in the pan and a loose foil tent for the low-oven stretch protects the lean shoulder without softening the glaze, if you uncover for the last 15 minutes.
- Horseradish sauceNo recipe is given here. A common period treatment was whipped cream or thick sour cream folded with drained grated horseradish, a pinch of salt and a little vinegar, served cold against the hot meat.
- YieldThe recipe gives six to eight across the whole 3 to 4 1/2 lb range; at the lower end that is optimistic, and a 3 lb piece is realistically closer to four or five servings if the ham is the centre of the plate.