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Hams, to Cure Sweet in the Westmoreland way
- INGREDIENTS. 3. lbs of common salt, 3 lbs. of coarse sugar, 1 lb. of bay-salt, 3 quarts of strong beer.
Before the hams are put into pickle, rub them the preceding day well with salt, and drain the brine well from them. Put the above ingredients into a saucepan, and boil for 1/4 hour; pour over the hams and let them remain a month in the pickle. Rub and turn them every day, but do not take them out of the pickling-pan, and have them smoked for a month.
TIME. To be pickled 1 month; to be smoked 1 month.
SEASONABLE from October to March.
Hams, To Pickle. (Suffolk Recipe.) -INGREDIENTS.-To a ham from 10 to 12 lbs., allow 1 lb. of coarse sugar, lb. of salt, 1 oz. of saltpetre, 1/2 a teacupful of vinegar.
Rub the hams well with common salt, and leave them for a day or two to drain; then rub well in the above proportion of sugar, salt, saltpetre, and vinegar, and turn them every other day. Keep them in the pickle 1 month, drain them, and send them to be smoked over a wood fire for 3 weeks or a month.
TIME. To remain in the pickle 1 month; to be smoked 3 weeks or 1 month.
SEASONABLE. Hams should be pickled from October to March.
Hams, To Salt Two, about 12 or 15 lbs. each. - INGREDIENTS. -2 lbs. of treacle, 1/2 lb. of saltpetre, 1 lb. of bay-salt, 2 lbs. of common salt.
Two days before they are put into the pickle, rub the hams well with salt, to draw away all slime and blood. Throw what comes from them away, and then rub them with treacle, saltpetre and salt. Lay them in a deep pan, and let them remain one day; boil the above proportion of treacle, HAMS, TO SMOKE. saltpetre, bay-salt and common salt for hour, and pour this pickle boiling hot over the hams: there should be sufficient of it to cover them. For a day or two rub them well with it; afterwards they will only require turning. They ought to remain in this pickle for 3 weeks or a month, and then be sent to be smoked, which will take nearly or quite a month to do. An oxtongue pickled in this way is most excellent, to be eaten either green or smoked.
TIME. To remain in the pickle 3 weeks or a month; to be smoked about a month.
SEASONABLE from October to March.
This is a farmhouse dry-and-brine cure followed by a month of cold smoking, written for stone-floored larders and a village smokehouse. It is worth reading as a record of how a ham was made, but the method cannot be followed safely in a domestic kitchen today.
- Saltpetre is out of controlled rangeHalf a pound of saltpetre (potassium nitrate) to two hams of 12 to 15 lbs each is a very large dose by modern standards, where curing salts are used at fractions of a percent of meat weight. Nitrate and nitrite quantities in cured meat are now regulated precisely because both excess and deficiency are dangerous.
- Cold smoking for a monthSmoking "over a wood fire" for three to four weeks in these recipes means cold smoke, well below any temperature that kills pathogens. The meat is preserved only by the salt and nitrate having penetrated correctly, and there is no step here that verifies they have.
- No temperatures, no weights, no timing checksNothing in the text specifies the temperature of the pickling room, the brine strength, or the finished water activity of the ham. Cured whole muscle held at ambient temperature without those controls carries a real risk of Clostridium botulinum, which produces no smell or off appearance.
- Salt figures that do not survive intactThe Suffolk proportion gives a bare "lb. of salt" with no fraction, so the salt-to-sugar ratio for that cure is unrecoverable. A curing formula with a missing quantity cannot be scaled or judged.
- Bay-saltBay-salt is sea salt evaporated in shallow pans, coarse and slightly grey, and it carried trace minerals. It is not interchangeable with modern refined table salt.
- Treacle and coarse sugarTreacle here is black treacle, close to modern blackstrap molasses; "coarse sugar" means unrefined brown sugar. Both were the sweet element of the cure and gave these hams their dark exterior and characteristic flavour.
- "Green" tongueThe note that an ox-tongue may be eaten "green or smoked" uses green in its old butchery sense: cured but not smoked, not raw and not fresh.
- If you want to cure a hamUse a current recipe from a source that specifies curing salt by percentage of meat weight, refrigeration temperature, and a target weight loss. Do not adapt the proportions above.
Sweet cures built on sugar, treacle or beer belong to the north and west of England, where Westmoreland, Cumberland and Wiltshire hams all traded on a darker, less aggressively salty flavour than the plain brine cures of the eastern counties. Beer in a ham pickle was practical as well as flavourful on a farm that brewed its own: strong ale contributed sugars and a little acidity, and cost nothing that had not already been made in the house. The October-to-March window given in every one of these entries is the whole logic of the thing, since pigs were killed after the autumn mast and the cold months were the only period when a ham could sit a month in an open pan without spoiling. Mrs Beeton collected regional cures by county name in this way throughout the household books, and all three end by sending the finished ham out "to be smoked" rather than describing any smoking done at home.