Ham, to Bake
INGREDIENTS.- Ham; a common crust. AVERAGE COST of York ham, 10d . to 1s. per lb.
As a ham for baking should be well soaked, let it remain in water for at least 12 hours. Wipe it dry, trim away any rusty places underneath, and cover it with a common crust, taking care that this is of sufficient thickness all over to keep the gravy gravy in. Place it in a moderately-heated .
Place it in a moderately-heated oven, and bake for nearly 4 hours. Take off the crust and skin, and cover with raspings, the same as for boiled ham, and garnish the knuckle with a paper frill.
This method of cooking a ham is, by many persons , considered far superior to boiling it, as it cuts fuller of gravy and has a finer.
HAM, TO BOIL. flavour, besides keeping a much longer time good.
TIME. A medium-sized ham, 4 hours.
SEASONABLE all the year.
Ham, water, glaze, or raspings. AVERAGE
This is a whole dry-cured ham sealed in a flour-and-water paste and baked — the crust is a disposable vessel, not something to eat. A few conversions and one temperature check bring it into a modern kitchen.
- The crust is the pointA "common crust" here is a stiff flour-and-water paste of the type sometimes called huff paste: flour worked with just enough water to bind, rolled out thick and sealed with no gaps. The recipe gives no quantities, only that it must be thick enough all over "to keep the gravy in". It holds moisture and steam against the meat and is thrown away afterwards. Heavy foil over a tight roasting tin does the same job if you would rather not make it.
- Whether to soak at allTwelve hours in cold water was necessary for a hard, heavily salted Victorian ham. Most cured hams sold today are mild, wet-cured and often labelled ready-to-eat; soaking them achieves nothing. Soak only a genuine dry-cured whole ham, and change the water once or twice.
- "Moderately-heated oven"Roughly 325-350F/160-175C. With the paste on, the meat effectively steams, so the crust browning tells you nothing about doneness.
- Use a thermometer, not the clockBeeton gives no weight, only "a medium-sized ham, 4 hours", which implies a large bone-in joint. Cook an uncooked cured ham to 145F/63C in the thickest part away from the bone; a ham already cooked at the packer only needs bringing to 140F/60C. Beeton's time will overshoot a small modern joint badly.
- York hamA large, dry-salted, lightly smoked, long-matured ham from a mature pig. The nearest widely available equivalents are an uncooked country ham or a whole bone-in dry-cured leg; a supermarket wet-cured gammon behaves quite differently and needs less time.
- RaspingsDried breadcrumbs, browned. Crusts dried out in a low oven and rolled or blitzed fine, then patted over the fat once the skin is stripped. Beeton's alternative, glaze, is reduced stock painted on in layers.
- The knuckle frillPurely decorative — a paper cuff over the exposed bone so a carver can grip it. Skip it without loss.
- Rest and yieldLet it stand 20-30 minutes before carving. A large bone-in ham will feed a crowd and yield plenty of cold meat, and the point Beeton makes about keeping holds: a baked ham keeps well refrigerated for several days.
Enclosing meat in a stiff flour-and-water paste is much older than Beeton "" medieval and early modern English cookery used the same sealed cooking case, the "coffin," a way of roasting in an enclosed space before ovens could be regulated. By the 1860s the technique was still applied to hams, where the argument was exactly the one made here: baking keeps the juices in the joint rather than leaching them into the pot, while boiling washes out both salt and flavour. The York ham named in the costing was the prestige English cure of the period, dry-salted and matured for months, and at 10d to 1s a pound it would presumably have been a substantial purchase for a middle-class household. That expense may well be why the entry ends with the note about keeping: a baked ham, on this reading, was bought whole, carved over days, and expected to earn its price.