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Baked Ham
Put about a ten-pound ham into a bowl with a good supply of water and let it soak for twelve or fourteen hours. Remove it, trim off all the uneatable parts from the underneath side and spread it over thickly with a paste of water and flour. Place it in a baking dish and set the dish in a well-heated oven and bake for about four hours. When done remove, take off the flour and water crust, skin, brush over with glaze or grate a little crust of bread over it, place a paper frill on the knuckles, and serve with a garnish of vegetables cooked and cut up into various shapes. By cooking a ham in this way it is stewed in its own juice and is very full of flavor.
This is a whole dry-salt-cured raw ham sealed in a flour-and-water crust — the old "huff paste" method, which turns the oven into a sealed vessel. The technique still works, but almost nothing sold as "ham" in a supermarket today needs it.
- What kind of ham this isOscar means a whole bone-in ham that has been salt-cured and possibly smoked, but never cooked, which is why it needs twelve hours of soaking. A modern wet-cured, fully cooked supermarket ham is already mild and already safe to eat, and soaking it does nothing. To follow this recipe you want an uncooked country ham or a fresh-cured whole ham from a butcher.
- The soak is not optionalA dry-cured ham carries enough salt to be inedible straight from the cure. Twelve to fourteen hours in cold water, changed two or three times, draws it down. Soak in the refrigerator or a cool cellar, not on a warm counter.
- "Well-heated oven"The recipe gives no temperature. For a four-hour bake on a ten-pound ham, a modern equivalent is somewhere around 325 to 350F, though "well-heated" may well have meant hotter; watch the flour crust, which will scorch through at high heat before the centre is done.
- The huff pasteMix plain flour with water to a stiff, rollable dough — roughly three parts flour to one part water by weight — and cover the ham a good half-inch thick, sealing any cracks. The crust is not eaten; it is a disposable baking vessel that keeps the juices in. Set the ham on a rack in the dish so the underside does not steam in its own drippings.
- Time versus temperatureFour hours is a reasonable estimate for ten pounds at 325F, but bone-in hams vary. Cook to an internal reading of 145F at the thickest part away from the bone, taken by pushing a probe through the crust; country hams are often taken to 155-160F for texture.
- Cracking the crustLet the ham rest twenty minutes before you break the paste off, or the escaping steam takes the juices with it. Then peel the skin, leaving the fat.
- Glaze or crumbs"glaze" in period professional cookery normally meant reduced meat stock (glace de viande) brushed on for shine, not a brown-sugar glaze. The grated bread crust is the older alternative: press dry fine crumbs into the fat and give it a short spell in a hot oven to colour.
- Frill and yieldThe paper frill is a Victorian nicety that hides the sawn bone end and gives the carver something to hold; frilled picks and butcher's paper both do the job. A ten-pound bone-in ham serves 18 to 20 as a main course, more on a buffet.
Sealing meat in a thick flour-and-water crust — "huff paste" or "huff pastry" in older English kitchens — long predates reliable ovens, and was used for hams, hares and joints that would otherwise dry out in fierce, uneven heat. The crust is a container rather than a pastry, and Oscar Tschirky's closing sentence explains exactly why it survived into the Waldorf kitchen: the ham "is stewed in its own juice," which is what a lidded pot does and what an open roasting pan does not. The long preliminary soak dates the ham itself: in 1896 a whole ham might still be a hard, heavily salted keeping-meat, cured to survive months without refrigeration, though milder sweet-pickle cures were already in commercial use by then. Full precooking at the packing house came later, and with it the flour crust, the twelve-hour soak, and much of the point of the method quietly disappeared.