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Boiled Ham (Soak over night if necessary)
Soak over night if necessary. Wash and trim off all dark skin; place in kettle; cover with cold water and boil a half hour. Remove to cooker for four to six hours, using one radiator. Boil about eight hours if no radiator is used, and reheat when the time is half expired.
This is a fireless-cooker recipe, and the method rather than the ingredient is the problem: after a brief boil the ham is left for four to eight hours in an unheated insulated box. The notes below explain the vocabulary and why the procedure should not be reproduced.
- What a "cooker" is hereA fireless cooker was an insulated wooden or metal chest, usually lined with felt, asbestos or packed hay, into which a pot of boiling food was sealed to finish on retained heat alone. It has no heating element and no thermostat.
- "One radiator"The radiators were soapstone or cast-iron discs heated on the range and dropped into the well above or below the pot. One radiator is a single charge of stored heat, with no way to measure or maintain it.
- Why the method fails for hamA whole ham is dense and heavy, and no weight is given here. A half-hour boil heats the outside; the interior climbs slowly, then the whole box begins to cool. Over four to eight hours the centre can spend a long stretch in the range where bacteria multiply, and the recipe gives no temperature to hit or hold.
- The eight-hour version is worseWith no radiator at all, the only heat in the box is what the water carried in. The instruction to "reheat when the time is half expired" shows that the temperature was expected to fall over the long cook.
- No thermometer anywhereCured pork still needs to reach and hold a measured internal temperature. Nothing in this recipe tells the cook what that is or offers any way to verify it, which is why a current recipe should be used instead.
- "Soak over night if necessary"This addresses a heavily dry-salted country ham of the period, which had to be leached before cooking. Most supermarket ham today is mildly wet-cured and often sold ready-cooked, so the soaking step largely answers a problem that no longer arises.
- "Dark skin"The trimming most likely refers to the smoke-darkened rind and any surface mould from the smokehouse or larder, a routine step when hams hung for months in the open air.
Fireless cookery had a brief, energetic vogue in the first decades of the twentieth century, when a coal or wood range meant tending a fire all afternoon in a hot kitchen. The insulated box promised to do the long, slow work of the range on a half-hour of fuel, and domestic-science writers of the period promoted it hard as an economy for the household without servants; commercial models were sold alongside patterns for building one at home from a packing crate and hay. Ham was a natural candidate, being a keeping meat already in most larders and traditionally simmered for hours, and books of this era commonly carried a whole fireless section of such recipes. What the enthusiasm lacked was any instrument for knowing what was happening inside the box, and the food-safety understanding that made retained-heat cooking of large cuts look reckless arrived considerably later.