To Boil a Ham
Well soak the ham in a large quantity of water for twenty-four hours, then trim and scrape it very clean; put it in a large pot with more than sufficient water to cover it; put in a blade of mace, bay leaves. Boil it for four or five a few cloves, a sprig of thyme and two hours , according to its weight; and when done, let it become cold in the liquor in rind carefully, without injuring the fat, which it was boiled. Then remove the press a cloth over it to absorb as much of the grease as possible, and shake some bread raspings over the fat. Brown quickly in hot oven. Serve cold, garnished with parsley.
The type was set badly here: two lines have been transposed, so the boiling time and the aromatics run into each other. Read it as "put in a blade of mace, a few cloves, a sprig of thyme and two bay leaves. Boil it for four or five hours, according to its weight" and "remove the rind carefully, without injuring the fat, which press a cloth over."
- The soak is for a ham you probably do not haveTwenty-four hours in cold water draws salt out of a dry-cured, long-hung country ham. A modern supermarket ham is wet-cured, mildly salted and often already cooked; soaking it does nothing but waterlog it. Reserve the soak for a genuine dry-cured whole ham, and change the water once or twice.
- Do not actually boilA rolling boil tightens and shreds the muscle fibres. Bring it up and then hold the water at a bare shiver, around 180F, with the surface barely moving. Reckon roughly 20 minutes per pound for a raw cured ham, and go by internal temperature rather than the clock: 145F at the thickest point, clear of the bone.
- Cooling in the liquorLetting it cool in its own broth keeps the meat moist, and it is worth doing. Do not leave a large ham sitting out on the stove all night, though: once the pot has stopped steaming, move it to the refrigerator, or ladle liquor and ham into a smaller vessel that will chill faster.
- Blade of maceA blade is a piece of the dried lacy aril that surrounds the nutmeg seed, not a spoonful of ground mace. If you only have ground, roughly a scant quarter teaspoon will stand in; cracked nutmeg is a rougher substitute, related in flavour but not the same thing.
- Bread raspingsThese are the dried, rasped crusts of stale bread, sieved to a fine crumb. Dry breadcrumbs, toasted a shade in a dry pan first, give the same effect. Press them onto the fat while it is still slightly tacky so they stick.
- "Quick" oven"Hot" oven -- the recipe says hot, not quick. Old oven terms were not standardised, but 'hot' is usually taken as somewhere around 400 to 450F, and here only for as long as it takes the crumbed fat to colour, ten to fifteen minutes. The ham is already cooked through at this stage, and a long stay in the oven will only dry the outer inch.
- YieldA bone-in ham gives roughly two to three servings per pound once sliced cold. A 12 lb ham will feed a large table with plenty left, which is very much the point of the dish.
Boiled-then-glazed ham is a standing cold centrepiece of the English and American sideboard, and it suits a household manual precisely because it is among the most forgiving things a new household can put on a table: it is cooked a day ahead, it improves on chilling, it carves cold, and it stretches across several meals as slices, then sandwiches, then stock. The twenty-four hour soak suggests a book written for hams cured hard with salt and hung for months, the ordinary state of pork before mild, quick, wet cures became common. Bread raspings on the fat are a cheaper alternative to a sugar glaze, and the browning in a hot oven at the end may echo the older practice of finishing a boiled joint before the fire to give it colour.