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Boiled Ham
Mrs. C. Waggoner.
Take a ham weighing about eight or ten pounds; soak it for twelve or twenty-four hours in cold water; then cover it with boiling water, add one pint of vinegar, two or three bay-leaves, a little bunch of thyme and parsley, (the dried and sifted will do, or even the seeds of parsley may be used, if the fresh cannot be procured); boil very slowly two hours and a half, take it out, skim it, remove all the fat, except a layer half an inch thick; cut off with a sharp knife all the black-looking outside; put the ham into your dripping pan, fat side uppermost, grate bread crust over it and sprinkle a teaspoon of powdered sugar over it; put it in the oven for half an hour, until it is a beautiful brown. Eat cold; cut the nicest portion in slices; the ragged parts and odds and ends can be chopped fine and used for sandwiches; or, by adding three eggs to one pint of chopped ham, and frying brown, you have a delicious omelette for breakfast or lunch. The bones should be put in a soup-kettle, the rind and fat should be rendered and strained for frying potatoes and crullers. Ham cooked in this way will go much farther than when cooked in the ordinary manner.
This is written for a raw, dry-salt-cured ham, which is why it begins with a day in cold water. Nearly every ham sold in a supermarket today is already brined and fully cooked, and the two are not interchangeable.
- Know which ham you haveThe long soak, the boiling and the vinegar all exist to draw salt out of a hard country cure. A modern wet-cured, fully-cooked ham needs no soaking and no boiling; it only wants reheating and the bread-crumb glaze. Reserve this method for a genuine dry-cured raw ham from a butcher.
- Cook to temperature, not the clockTwo and a half hours is about 15 minutes per pound for a ten-pound ham, nearer 19 for an eight-pound one, and the ham then gets a further half hour in the oven. Use a thermometer at the thickest point away from the bone: 145F for a raw cured ham, with a few minutes' rest before it leaves the pot. Reheated pre-cooked ham wants about 140F.
- "Boil very slowly"This means a bare shiver at the surface, around 180-185F. An actual rolling boil tightens and shreds the muscle around the bone; the whole point of the slow simmer is a ham that slices cleanly cold.
- "Skim it" means skin it"Skim it" probably means skin it -- the likeliest reading is that the rind is pulled off while the ham is hot, leaving about half an inch of fat, before the darkened outer surface is pared away with a knife. Rind comes off easily hot and fights you cold.
- Grated bread crustDry, hard crust grated on a box grater -- coarse dried breadcrumbs, not the soft fresh kind and not panko. A dry crumb browns; a damp one steams.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. Around 375F will brown the crumb coating in the half hour specified. Watch it near the end, since the sugar can scorch before the crumbs colour.
- Powdered sugarIn this period the term generally means sugar ground fine, not the cornstarch-cut confectioners' sugar of today. Superfine or caster sugar is the closer match, and a teaspoon over a whole ham is a light dusting for colour rather than a sweet glaze.
- Herbs and vinegarOne pint of vinegar in the pot is a lot by modern habit but it is diluted by several quarts of water; cider vinegar suits pork better than white. Parsley seed is genuinely hard to find now -- a few stems of parsley or a bay leaf more will cover it.
- Yield and the leftoversAn eight to ten pound bone-in ham serves 15-20 cold. The ham omelette is three eggs to a full pint of chopped ham, which is a hash bound with egg rather than an omelette as now understood; cook it gently or the eggs turn tough.
The Home Cook Book was compiled in the 1870s from contributions by named lady contributors, and the signature on this one -- Mrs. C. Waggoner -- is doing real work: the recipe is her method, vouched for by name, in a book assembled by dozens of such contributors. The dish assumes a household economy that has largely vanished. A ham of this kind was dry-salted and hung, needing a day's soaking before it was fit to eat, and the recipe accounts for every part of it: the good slices for the table, the ragged bits for sandwiches or an egg dish, the bones for the soup kettle, the rind and fat rendered down for frying potatoes and crullers. The closing claim, that a ham cooked this way "will go much farther," is the actual argument being made, and it is the argument of a cook feeding a large household from one expensive piece of meat. Boiling first and browning after is an old European technique for salt meat -- the simmer moderates the cure, the oven supplies the crust that boiling cannot -- and it long predates this book on both sides of the Atlantic.