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Pop Gosse's Barbecued Ham
With an ice pick stick holes in the skin and push cloves in the holes. Smear ham with garlic oil or rub with garlic first. Take the paper the ham was wrapped in and lay the ham on it, clove side down, rub the other side of the ham with a large handful of brown sugar, place over the sugar a couple of lemons sliced, some black pepper and Worcestershire sauce, cover the whole with the paper, pasting with paste of raw flour and water; then another layer of paper, sealed well with paste to close all holes. Tie well with a wire so that the whole can be turned over with a hook on a long pole. Bake either in a pit as for the Bull's Head, or in an oven. Will take 5 or 6 hours. If properly cooked, any juices escaping from the ham will be caught by the paper. The large fish from Pyramid Lake are sometimes cooked in this manner; after cleaning, wrap in paper and burlap, place in a hot out-of-doors pit, and bake. The Indians wrap their fish in willows instead of paper and take great care in seeing that the fire in the hole is deep and that there are plenty of hot rocks. This manner of cooking fish is used by fishermen, too. A hunter I know cooks squirrels the same way and seems to think they are the best eating he knows. Cowboys on the range, who do not always have paper and burlap, plaster the head of a steer or calf with clay and bake it in the same way as the Bull's Head Breakfast and find it works just as well.
A whole ham sealed in flour-pasted butcher paper and baked slowly, either in a pit or in a domestic oven. The paper is the cooking vessel, so the hinge is the seal.
- Seal before all elseThe paste of raw flour and water is what turns the wrapping into a sealed packet; if steam and fat find a hole, the paper chars through and the ham dries out. Work the paste over every seam and overlap, let the first layer set slightly, then apply the second.
- Paper and oven temperatureNo temperature is given. Paper scorches badly above about 400F and is generally reckoned to ignite somewhere around 450F, so a moderate oven of 325-350F is a safe working range for the full 5 to 6 hours. If the butcher paper to hand is thin, two or three layers, or a layer of parchment inside the paper, gives it more body.
- What ham is meantPresumably a whole bone-in cured ham, of the sort sold wrapped in heavy paper by a butcher; the 5 to 6 hours implies something large, in the region of 12-16 lb, at low heat. A modern supermarket ham is usually already fully cooked and needs only to be heated through, which takes a fraction of the time.
- Cloves and the skinAn ice pick is simply a spike for making the clove holes; a thin boning knife or a metal skewer does the same. Whole cloves are strong, so a couple of dozen spaced over the skin is plenty for a large ham.
- The sugar side goes upThe clove-studded skin lies face down on the paper and the brown sugar, lemon, pepper and Worcestershire go on the exposed side. Keeping that side uppermost until the packet is turned lets the sugar melt into the meat rather than running straight onto the paper.
- Turning the packetThe wire and long hook are for a pit, where the packet is buried and lifted. In an oven, set the packet on a rack over a deep roasting pan and turn it once at the halfway point with two pairs of tongs.
- Resting and carvingLet the packet stand 20 to 30 minutes before opening, then cut it over a tray so the collected juices are not lost. A ham this size serves 20 or more.
- The Pyramid Lake fishThe aside about large fish from Pyramid Lake is period reporting, not an instruction to follow. The cui-ui of that lake is federally endangered and the Lahontan cutthroat trout is listed as threatened; fishing there is managed by the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe under permit.