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Curing Hams
Mrs. Mulford.
Hang up the hams a week or ten days, the longer the tenderer and better, if kept perfectly sweet; mix for each good-sized ham, one teacup of salt, one tablespoon of molasses, one ounce of salt-petre; lay the hams in a clean dry tub; heat the mixture and rub well into the hams, especially around the bones and recesses; repeat the process once or twice, until all the mixture is used; then let the hams lie two or three days, when they must be put for three weeks in brine strong enough to bear an egg; then soak eight hours in cold water; hang up to dry in the kitchen or other more convenient place for a week or more; smoke from three to five days, being careful not to heat the hams. Corn cobs and apple-tree wood are good for smoking. The juices are better retained if smoked with the hock down. Tie up carefully in bags for the summer.
This is a nineteenth-century dry-cure-then-brine method for whole fresh hams, written for a cold winter cellar and a smokehouse. It cannot be reproduced safely in a modern kitchen, and the notes below explain where it fails rather than how to fix it.
- Unrefrigerated hangingThe recipe opens by hanging fresh, uncured pork for "a week or ten days" at ambient temperature, relying on the phrase "if kept perfectly sweet" as the only control. That step assumes a winter larder holding near freezing; at any temperature above about 40F it is an incubation period for spoilage and for Staphylococcus aureus, whose toxin survives later smoking.
- Saltpetre with no weight of meatOne ounce of potassium nitrate per "good-sized ham" is an unmeasured ratio — a 12 lb ham and a 20 lb ham get the same dose. Nitrate levels in cured meat are now regulated by weight for a reason, and this quantity is far above modern limits for the smaller end of that range.
- Nitrate is not nitriteSaltpetre works only after bacterial conversion to nitrite, which is slow and unpredictable. Modern curing uses pre-measured nitrite salts precisely because the protective compound is delivered in a known amount from the start; a nitrate cure can leave the interior of a large ham unprotected for days.
- "Brine strong enough to bear an egg"This is a float test for a heavy salt brine, though an egg will float well short of saturation, and it tells you nothing about the brine's temperature, the pumping of the deep muscle, or how far the cure has penetrated in three weeks. Whole-muscle curing failures are almost always interior failures, and this method has no way to detect one.
- Cold smoking without temperature control"Being careful not to heat the hams" is explicit cold smoking over three to five days. The meat sits for days in a temperature range where pathogens can grow, and is never brought to a safe internal temperature at any point in the process as written.
- TrichinellaNineteenth-century home-slaughtered pork carried real trichinosis risk, and freezing or cooking to temperature was not part of this method. Commercial pork today is a different risk picture, but the recipe as written contains no kill step of any kind.
- Units, for reading onlyA teacup in period recipes is generally smaller than a modern measuring cup, but the book supplies no equivalence, and "good-sized ham" is undefined. Corn cobs and apple wood were genuinely favored smoking fuels and remain so, though that is the only part of this worth carrying forward.
- If you want a home-cured hamUse a current, tested curing recipe that specifies cure weight against meat weight, brine temperature, and a finishing internal temperature.
The Home Cook Book (Chicago, 1870s) was among the earliest American charity compilation cookbooks, assembled from contributions by named local women — hence "Mrs. Mulford" attached to this entry. Curing instructions sat comfortably beside cakes and puddings in such books because a great many subscribers still bought or raised whole hogs and processed them at home each winter, when outdoor temperatures did the work a refrigerator does now. Saltpetre was the standard curing agent of the period, sold by the ounce at the druggist; its role in fixing the pink color and inhibiting spoilage organisms was well observed long before nitrite chemistry was understood, which is why recipes like this one specify it confidently while giving no ratio to the weight of the meat. The detail about smoking hock down to retain the juices is traditional practice rather than a documented effect, and the closing instruction to tie the hams in bags reflects the real summer problem these households faced: not bacteria, which they could not see, but flies.