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Veal Ham
Trim a leg of veal to the shape of a ham. Mix well together one pint of bay salt, one pound of common salt, one or two ounces of saltpeter, one ounce of powdered cinnamon and one ounce of juniper berries, also powdered. Rub the meat well with this mixture, and place it on a tray with the skin downwards. Baste it well every day for about two weeks. At the end of that time hang the meat over wood smoke for a fortnight. Afterwards boil or partially boil, and then roast it.
This is a dry-cure and cold-smoke procedure, not a cooking recipe, and it cannot be followed safely today. The notes below explain the terms and then why the method fails modern standards.
- Bay saltBay salt was coarse sea salt evaporated in shallow pans, sold in large crystals. It is measured here by volume (a pint) while the common salt is measured by weight, which alone makes the cure impossible to reproduce with any precision.
- No weight of meatA leg of veal can run anywhere from about 8 to 20 lb depending on the age of the animal and how hard it is trimmed. A cure is only meaningful as a percentage of the meat's weight, and the recipe gives none.
- Saltpeter is out of rangeOne to two ounces of potassium nitrate against an unknown weight of meat is an uncontrolled nitrate dose. Modern curing uses precisely measured nitrite or nitrate blends, dyed pink specifically so they cannot be confused with salt and overdosed. Nitrate at unknown concentration is one of the main reasons this recipe cannot be salvaged.
- Two weeks at unstated temperature"Place it on a tray... baste it well every day" assumes a cold larder. There is no temperature given for the curing period. Meat held for a fortnight anywhere above refrigeration temperature while the salt is still penetrating is a botulism and general spoilage risk.
- A fortnight of smokeHanging over wood smoke for two weeks is cold smoking, which does not cook the meat and does not by itself make it safe. Cold smoking depends entirely on the cure having done its work first, and here the cure is unquantified.
- "Boil or partially boil, then roast"No time, no temperature, no internal temperature. "Partially boil" is exactly the phrase that should stop a modern cook: a cured leg that has not reached a safe internal temperature and has never been properly refrigerated is not made safe by browning in an oven.
- If you want cured vealUse a current, tested curing recipe with cure weights given as a percentage of meat weight and specified holding temperatures. This page is worth reading as a record of how it was done, not as instructions.
"Veal ham" belongs to a long European habit of treating any large leg like a pig's: trim it to the familiar ham shape, cure it, smoke it, and it keeps and slices like the real thing. English and French household books of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries carry versions under names like veal ham and mutton ham, and the spice mix here — juniper, cinnamon, saltpeter for colour — is the standard old bacon-and-ham rub of that tradition. Oscar Tschirky's book, published in 1896 out of the Waldorf, collects a great deal of this older larder knowledge alongside the hotel's restaurant cooking, and entries like this one reflect a kitchen that still expected to preserve its own meat rather than order it in. Juniper's association with cured pork is very old and generally traced to northern European practice, where the berries were among the few aromatics that grew locally and dried well.<br><br>What dates the recipe most clearly is what it does not say: no weights of meat, no temperatures, no times beyond "a fortnight." It was written for a cook who had a cold cellar, a smokehouse, and years of judgement about both.</br></br>