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Baked Ham
Mrs. W. G. Davis.
Most persons boil ham. It is much better baked, if baked right. Soak it for an hour in clean water and wipe it dry, next spread it all over with thin batter, and then put it into a deep dish with sticks under it to keep it out of the gravy. When it is fully done and the batter crusted on the flesh side, take off the skin and set it away to cool.
A nineteenth-century dry-baked ham, sealed under a flour paste rather than simmered in water. The method still works, but the ham it was written for was a hard, heavily salted, dry-cured joint, not the wet-cured supermarket ham of today.
- The batter is a huff paste, not a glazeThe batter is a protective crust, not a glaze -- "thin batter" here is most likely flour slaked with water, spread over the whole joint, in the manner of the old flour-and-water huff paste. It bakes to a hard shell that holds in moisture and, on the evidence of the instruction to take off the skin at the end, was not meant to be eaten.
- The soak depends on your hamOne hour suits a modern mild-cured or "ready to cook" ham, and many need no soak at all. A traditional dry-cured country ham needs 12 to 24 hours in several changes of cold water before it is fit to bake.
- Oven temperatureThe book gives none. Bake at 325F. Higher heat cracks the paste before the centre is warmed through.
- Sticks under itAny trivet or rack that lifts the joint clear of the rendered fat and juices in the dish. Without it the underside stews and the paste dissolves.
- Timing and donenessFigure roughly 20 minutes per pound for a raw cured ham, but go by a thermometer pushed into the thickest part away from the bone: 145F for a raw cured leg, 140F for one already cooked. The recipe gives no test beyond "fully done"; the traditional sign was the shank bone turning loose, which comes late.
- Take off the skin while hotThe rind and paste peel away cleanly the moment the ham comes out of the oven and become very difficult once cool. Score and glaze the fat then if you want a browned surface.
- Cooling"Set it away to cool" meant a cold larder. Cool at room temperature no more than two hours, then refrigerate; a whole ham holds heat for a long time and should not sit out overnight.
- YieldA bone-in ham gives roughly two to three servings per pound, so a 10 lb joint feeds a crowd and leaves plenty for slicing cold, which the instruction to cool it suggests was expected.
Boiling was the default treatment for a cured leg through most of the nineteenth century, because it drew out salt from hams that had been packed hard enough to keep a year without refrigeration. Mrs. Davis is arguing the minority position, and the flour-paste crust she calls a "thin batter" is the same huff or huff-paste technique English cooks had used since at least the eighteenth century to bake meat and game without drying it, the paste acting as a disposable sealed vessel long before covered roasters were common. The Home Cook Book (Toronto, 1877) carries contributors' names, though much of its content was lifted from the earlier Chicago Home Cook Book, which is why the recipe reads as one cook's opinion rather than a standard procedure.