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BOILED HAM (Wash the ham thoroughly put it)
Wash the ham thoroughly, put it on the stove in a kettle of cold water; let it come to a boil, then keep it boiling steadily until done; allow about twenty minutes to the pound; if it is to be served hot, peel off the skin and stick in a few whole cloves; if the ham is to be served cold, let it stand in the pot until the water becomes cold, then peel off and serve the same.
A method rather than a recipe: a whole cured ham, simmered in water, served hot with cloves or cold in its own set juices. The one change worth making is heat level — the original says "boiling steadily," and that is what toughens the meat.
- Boil means simmerHold the water at 180–185F, with the surface barely moving. A rolling boil for hours squeezes the muscle fibers and gives you dry, stringy ham even though it is submerged.
- What kind of ham this assumesA ham of this period was dry-salt or brine cured and sold uncooked; many were heavily salted, closer to a modern country ham than to the pink supermarket ham, which is generally already fully cooked and wet-cured (milder commercially cured hams were also on sale by then). If you are working with a modern city ham, it needs reheating only, not two hours per 6 lb.
- Twenty minutes to the poundThat figure is for a raw cured ham and works out to around 4 hours for a 12 lb piece. Use a thermometer instead: 145F at the thickest point, away from the bone, for an uncooked cured ham (with a rest before carving); 140F if it is already cooked.
- Soak first if it is a country hamAn old-style heavily salted ham wants 12–24 hours in cold water, changed two or three times, before it goes in the kettle. The recipe says only "wash thoroughly," which suggests it was not written with a heavily salted country ham in mind.
- The kettleYou need a pot deep enough to keep the ham covered throughout — top up with boiling water as it evaporates. A 12 lb bone-in ham wants at least a 16-quart stockpot; a roasting pan on two burners, covered with foil, works if nothing else fits.
- Cloves and finishingSkinning while hot is much easier than cold, and the cloves are studded into the fat. If you want the browned, glazed exterior most people expect, score the fat, press on brown sugar or mustard, and give it 20 minutes at 400F after simmering.
- Cooling in the liquidFor cold ham this is the good instruction and worth keeping — the meat reabsorbs liquid and slices without crumbling. Do not leave it out overnight, though: get the pot into the refrigerator or an ice bath once it drops below 140F.
- YieldFigure 1/3 to 1/2 lb of bone-in ham per person. Save the cooking water for split pea or bean soup, but taste it first; it can be far too salty to use undiluted.
Boiling was the standard way to cook a whole ham for much of the nineteenth century, and for good reason: home-cured hams were salty and often hard enough that gentle water cooking softened them and drew off some of the salt at the same time. The book puts the method in the plainest possible terms, treating it as familiar territory; hams still commonly arrived uncooked and needed hours of attention, whether home-cured or bought from a packer. The convention of the cold ham cooling in its own broth belongs to the same world, where a large boiled ham stood in the larder as the basis for days of sliced cold meat, sandwiches, and chopped scraps in croquettes. What changed the recipe out from under the reader was industrial wet-curing and pre-cooking, which in the middle decades of the twentieth century turned "boil a ham" into "reheat a ham" and made the twenty-minutes-to-the-pound rule a relic.