Baked Ham
Put a medium-sized ham in a pot and cover with sweet cider. Let it simmer gently for three and one-half hours.
Skim frequently to remove the grease as it rises. When tender take out and remove the rind; cut the fat on top into diamonds and in each diamond stick a clove; then rub over the top of the ham one-half of a cupful of maple syrup, place in the oven and bake slowly for forty-five minutes.
A whole cider-simmered ham with a maple glaze, written when hams came raw-cured and needed hours of gentle cooking. The main adjustment is for the ham itself: almost everything sold today is already fully cooked.
- Know which ham you haveA modern supermarket "city ham" is wet-cured and fully cooked, and 3.5 hours of simmering will shred it into strings. This method suits a raw or partially cooked bone-in ham; if yours is labelled fully cooked, skip the simmer and go straight to the glaze and a low oven until heated through.
- Medium-sized hamThe recipe gives no weight; a bone-in whole or half ham, likely somewhere in the 10 to 14 lb range, is the reasonable reading. Judge simmering time by weight and tenderness rather than the flat three and a half hours.
- Sweet ciderUnfermented apple cider, not hard cider and not cider vinegar. Unfiltered cloudy apple juice is the closest modern equivalent; it will take several quarts to cover a large ham, so a tall stockpot or a roaster on two burners works better than a wide pan.
- Simmer, do not boilBubbles should barely break the surface. A rolling boil tightens the muscle fibres and gives you dry, stringy ham no matter how long you cook it afterwards.
- Use a thermometerRaw cured ham is done at 145F internal, measured away from the bone, with a short rest. Tenderness at the fork is the old test but the thermometer is the reliable one, and it also stops you overshooting.
- Bake slowlyThe recipe names no temperature; 'slowly' is usually taken as a slow to moderate oven, somewhere around 275 to 325F. The point of the final 45 minutes is to set the glaze and dry the surface slightly, not to cook the meat further.
- Scoring and clovesCut through the fat in a diamond lattice but stop at the meat; cutting deeper lets juices run out into the pan. Whole cloves are meant to be pulled out before carving, one per diamond.
- The maple glazeHalf a cup of real maple syrup will run off a hot ham. Brush it on in two or three coats during the bake, or thicken it with a spoonful of mustard or brown sugar so it clings.
- Yield and the cooking liquidA 12 lb bone-in ham serves 15 to 20 with leftovers. The cider broth is salty but excellent as a base for split pea or bean soup, once the fat is skimmed off cold.
Simmering a ham in cider before glazing it belongs to the apple-growing regions of the northeastern United States and England alike, where cider was cheap and plentiful. A baked ham is exactly the dish a household manual of this period would favour: it feeds a crowd, it survives being cooked by someone learning, and it yields days of cold slices and sandwiches afterwards. The clove-studded diamond lattice is older than the recipe, from a time when whole spices were a visible sign of expense. Maple syrup in place of the more usual brown sugar suggests a North American kitchen, where it was a local sweetener rather than an imported luxury.