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BOILED HAM (Cover the ham with cold water)
Cover the ham with cold water and let it boil for thirty minutes. Add a wineglass of sherry, remove to the fireless cooker and allow it to remain there for about seven hours. Remove from the water, trim the rind, stick cloves over it, sprinkle with brown sugar and bake in a moderate oven for a half hour.
This comes from the fireless-cooker chapter, and the method only makes sense once you know what that appliance was: an insulated box in which a pot brought to a hard boil finished cooking on retained heat alone. Nothing in a modern kitchen behaves quite the same way, so the timings need translating rather than copying.
- What a fireless cooker wasA wooden or metal chest packed with hay, felt or mineral wool, sometimes with a preheated soapstone disc. The pot went in boiling and coasted downward in temperature for hours. A heavy Dutch oven in a 200-210F oven, or a slow cooker on low, is the practical stand-in.
- The hinge: keep it hotRetained-heat cooking on a large ham is the one part of this not worth reproducing faithfully. A 10-lb ham and its water will slide out of safe holding range well before seven hours in an insulated box. If you cook it this way, hold it above 140F for the whole stretch in a low oven or slow cooker, with a probe thermometer in the water.
- A wineglass of sherryIn period usage a wineglass is roughly 2 fluid ounces, a quarter cup. It is a seasoning here, not a braising liquid, and any dry or medium amontillado does the job.
- Moderate oven350F. Half an hour is enough to set the sugar and dry the surface; the ham is already cooked through by then.
- The ham itselfThe recipe implies a bone-in, uncooked ham with the rind still on, of a kind sold at a butcher's counter. Much supermarket ham today is wet-cured and fully cooked, needs no long simmer at all, and often comes rindless, which removes both the trimming step and the fat surface the cloves were meant to grip.
- SoakingOld-style hams were salty enough that many cookbooks called for an overnight soak in cold water before boiling. If you buy a genuine dry-cured country ham, soak it; if you buy a modern city ham, do not, or the meat will taste washed out.
- Cloves and sugarScore the fat in a diamond lattice first, then set one whole clove per intersection. The clove heads burn if the oven runs hot, so keep to 350F and pull the ham when the sugar is glossy rather than dark.
- YieldNo size is given. If you work with a bone-in ham of 8-10 lb, expect to serve a dozen or more hot with plenty left for slicing cold.
The fireless cooker was a brief but serious enthusiasm in American households between roughly 1900 and the First World War, promoted in domestic-science bulletins and sold commercially as well as built at home from a crate and a bale of hay. The appeal was fuel economy: a coal or wood range had to be stoked and watched, and a dish that could be brought to the boil in the morning and left to finish itself freed both the fuel and the cook. Butterick, a pattern company whose cookbook sat squarely in the practical household-management tradition, gave the method its own chapter. Large cuts like ham suited it well, since they wanted long gentle cooking rather than an active boil. The finish here -- rind trimmed, cloves studded, brown sugar, a short spell in the oven -- is the standard glazed-ham treatment of the period and long predates the appliance; only the middle stage is a nod to the new technology.