Cold Ham
It may be just necessary to mention that hams to be roasted or baked are on rare occasions steeped in wine with spices and herbs, and are entirely covered with a flour-and-water paste and so baked. They are also after steeping (marinading) braised in covered iron saucepans, with seasoned soup stock and wine, and finished by baking brown.
Put the ham in water slightly warm and let it soak all night. Wash and set it on in cold water and boil 3 to 4 hours. Take it up, remove the skin and bake it in a moderate oven half an hour. Then withdraw it, cover with all the cracker meal that can be made to stick with pressure, and bake a few minutes longer to brown the breading. Cracker meal is pounded and sifted crackers. Dried bread crumbs do as well, or raspings of bread.
This is a whole dry-cured ham treated the old way: soaked, simmered, skinned, then breaded and browned. The method still works, but almost nothing sold as "ham" today needs the first two steps.
- Know which ham you haveThe overnight soak and the three-to-four-hour boil are for a hard, salt-cured, uncooked country ham — the kind that hangs at room temperature. A supermarket wet-cured ham is already fully cooked and only needs reheating; soaking and boiling it will leave you with grey, waterlogged meat.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350F. The half-hour bake after boiling is to dry and set the surface, not to cook the meat through; the crumbs then need only the few minutes the recipe allows, or a moment under the broiler if the crust is stubborn.
- Boiling time is a guide, not a ruleThree to four hours suits a ham of roughly 9 to 12 lb. Reckon about 20 minutes per pound at a bare simmer — never a rolling boil, which tightens the muscle — and take it out when a skewer slides in with no resistance and the small bone at the hock end turns freely.
- Cracker mealThe recipe defines it: pounded and sifted crackers, which in this period would generally have been plain soda or water crackers rather than sweet or heavily seasoned kinds. Panko, dried breadcrumbs or the 'raspings' the author mentions (the scraped crust of a stale loaf) all serve.
- Making the crumbs stickPress them onto the ham while the fat is still hot and tacky. Some period books brush the surface with beaten egg, or a glaze, before crumbing; this recipe relies on pressure alone, which works best if you do not let the ham cool first.
- The marinated and braised variantsThe opening lines describe two alternatives rather than steps: steeping the raw ham in spiced wine before baking it sealed under a flour-and-water paste, or braising it in stock and wine and finishing it in the oven. The paste corresponds to what English books call huff paste — a disposable seal that keeps the meat moist, discarded before serving.
- TemperatureBring the meat to 145F at the thickest point, away from the bone, and rest it. A long simmer will usually carry it well past this, so check before the oven stage rather than after.
- ServingDespite the title, the ham is cooked hot and then cooled — chill it thoroughly before slicing, or the crumb crust crumbles away. A 12 lb ham serves 20 or more as a cold cut.
Boiling a cured ham and then breading it was common practice in nineteenth-century American and English kitchens, and the crumb coat did real work: it absorbed rendering fat, kept the exposed surface from drying and darkening in the larder, and gave the cold ham a neat, uniform face for the table. Books of this period generally assume a ham that has been dry-salted and hung for months, which is why the overnight soak comes first — it draws out enough salt to make the meat palatable.