Boiled Ham
Soak several hours or over night in cold water to cover. Wash thoroughly, trim off hard skin near end of bone, put in a kettle, cover with cold water, heat to boiling-point, and cook slowly until tender. See Time Table for Cooking, page 28. Remove kettle from range and set aside, that ham may partially cool; then take from water, remove outside skin, sprinkle with sugar and fine cracker crumbs, and stick with cloves one-half inch apart. Bake one hour in a slow oven.
Serve cold, thinly sliced.
This is a whole bone-in cured ham of the old kind — heavily salted, often uncooked, and sold as a keeping meat. A modern supermarket ham has already been through most of these steps, so the first decision is which ham you actually have.
- Which ham this is forThe overnight soak only makes sense for a dry-salt-cured country ham, which can be aggressively salty. A wet-cured supermarket ham labelled "fully cooked" needs no soaking and no simmering at all; it wants only the glazing and baking stage.
- The soakCold water to cover, changed once or twice, for 8 to 12 hours. Scrub the exterior well afterward — a dry-cured ham may carry mould or a pepper coating that the wash is meant to remove.
- "Cook slowly" means below a boilThis is the hinge. Bring to the boiling point, then drop the heat so the water only shivers, around 180-185F. A rolling boil tightens the muscle fibres and gives you stringy, dry ham however long you cook it.
- TimingThe Time Table referenced is not reproduced here; boiling times for a ham of this size are generally reckoned at 20 to 25 minutes per pound. Judge by feel rather than clock: the ham is done when a skewer slides into the thickest part without resistance and the small bone at the hock end twists free. An instant-read thermometer should show 150-160F at the centre.
- Cooling in the liquidSetting the kettle aside to cool partially is not idleness; a ham left to cool in its own liquid is generally reckoned to stay moister. Allow an hour or so before lifting it out.
- "A slow oven"Around 300F; the term was used loosely for anything from roughly 275 to 325F. The hour of baking is for setting the glaze and drying the surface, not for cooking the meat, which is already done.
- Cracker crumbsPlain soda-cracker crumbs, finely rolled. Dry breadcrumbs work in their place. The recipe specifies only 'sugar'; a few tablespoons patted over the fat is enough.
- Scoring for the clovesThe recipe does not call for scoring, but cutting the fat in a diamond lattice about half an inch across before crumbing gives each clove a seat. Remove them before slicing — a whole clove bitten into is unpleasant.
- YieldA 10 to 12 lb bone-in ham gives 20 or more servings sliced thin, plus a bone worth keeping for soup.
Boiled ham of this sort was a standing cold dish, the thing kept in the larder to be sliced for breakfast, supper, sandwiches and unexpected callers, and the instruction to "serve cold, thinly sliced" assumes exactly that role. The long soak is a relic of curing done for preservation rather than flavour: before reliable refrigeration a ham was salted hard enough to keep for months, and the cook had to pull much of that salt back out before it was edible. The double treatment — simmered first, then glazed and baked — does two things at once, drawing out salt in the water and building a sweet, spiced crust on the exterior. Cloves stuck into ham fat are a long-standing habit, and they survive on holiday hams today largely as ornament.