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Boiled Ham (Let the ham soak in cold water)
Let the ham soak in cold water over night; wash thoroughly trim off the hard skin near the end of the bone; put in a kettle of cord water; heat to boiling point and cook slowly until tender allowing from fifteen to twenty minutes to the pound. Let it remain in the water until cold; then skin it and cut in thin slices.
A whole country ham handled the old way: soaked, simmered gently, cooled in its own liquor, then skinned and sliced thin for the table. Almost everything about it assumes a hard, dry-salt-cured ham rather than the wet-cured, ready-to-eat ham sold today.
- Which ham this is forThe overnight soak and the fifteen-to-twenty minutes per pound only make sense for a dry-cured, uncooked country ham, which is fiercely salty and firm. A modern supermarket ham is wet-cured and usually labelled fully cooked; soaking and long boiling will leave it waterlogged and stringy.
- "A kettle of cord water"A typesetter's slip for cold water. A kettle here is a large stockpot, not a tea kettle; a bone-in ham of any size needs a pot big enough to keep it submerged, which in practice means a very large one.
- Cook slowly means barely bubblingThe hinge of the recipe. Held at a rolling boil the muscle fibres tighten and the meat shreds dry; the recipe gives no temperature, but 'cook slowly' means water held just below a simmer, with only occasional lazy bubbles breaking the surface.
- Timing and a thermometerFifteen to twenty minutes to the pound is a reasonable estimate for a large ham, but ham varies enormously by cure and thickness. Judge by internal temperature at the thickest point, away from the bone, rather than by the clock alone.
- Cooling in the liquidLeaving a big joint to cool slowly in warm water is exactly the condition Clostridium perfringens likes. If you want the moisture benefit, cool the pot down quickly in a sink of iced water and get the ham into the refrigerator rather than letting it sit out overnight on the stove.
- Skin and trimThe "hard skin near the end of the bone" is the dried, sometimes mould-dusted rind of a hung country ham. Scrub the whole surface hard with a stiff brush before soaking; the skin peels off easily once cooked, leaving a fat layer that can be scored and glazed if you want it hot rather than cold.
- YieldA 12 lb bone-in ham gives roughly 7–8 lb of sliceable meat, enough for a large gathering plus a week of sandwiches. Slice it against the grain and as thin as you can manage — thick slices of cured ham eat unpleasantly salty.
Before refrigeration, a whole ham was a bank account: salted down in winter, hung to hang through the year, and drawn on as needed. The overnight soak in this recipe is not a nicety but a necessity, since a dry cure heavy enough to keep meat for months leaves it too salty to eat straight, and the cold water draws some of that salt back out. Cooling the ham in its own cooking water -- a step that appears in nineteenth-century cookbooks on both sides of the Atlantic -- was understood to keep the meat from drying and shrinking as it set, and it produced the firm, cold, paper-thin slices that were the backbone of the supper table, the picnic basket and the sandwich plate. The instruction to allow fifteen to twenty minutes to the pound is the sort of arithmetic that assumed no thermometer in the kitchen and a cook who knew what tender felt like under a fork.