Baked Ham
2-pound ham. 1 cup brown sugar 4 dozen cloves Wash a ham thoroughly and place in kettle with cold water. Cook slowly until tender. Remove from kettle and remove outside skin. Sprinkle with brown sugar and dot with cloves about one inch apart. Bake about 1 hour in a moderate oven 350°F. basting with cider and water.
A two-stage method — simmer, then glaze — that assumes a whole bone-in cured ham straight from the butcher rather than the pre-cooked supermarket kind. Read the label on your ham before you start, because it decides whether the first stage is needed at all.
- The hinge: is your ham already cooked?Almost every ham sold today is labelled "fully cooked" and needs only the bake to warm through and set the glaze. Reserve the long simmer for a raw or "cook-before-eating" ham, which is what this recipe was written for.
- Simmering time"Cook slowly until tender" works out to roughly 20 to 25 minutes per pound at a bare simmer, never a rolling boil, which tightens the meat. A raw ham is done at 145°F internal; a fully cooked one only needs to reach 140°F in the oven.
- Soaking the older kindCountry and dry-cured hams of this period were far saltier than what you will buy now. If you are using a genuine dry-cured ham, soak it 12 to 24 hours in cold water, changing the water, before it goes in the kettle.
- Skin and fatPull the skin off while the ham is still warm — it lifts away cleanly and resists once cold. Leave about a quarter-inch of fat, then score it in a diamond pattern so the sugar has somewhere to sit.
- ClovesFour dozen whole cloves set an inch apart cover roughly a 6-by-8-inch patch, so they will dress the main exposed face of the ham rather than its entire surface. Push them in at the intersections of the scoring; they are for aroma and are not meant to be eaten.
- Sugar that will not stay putDry brown sugar sprinkled on a wet ham slides off. Pat the surface dry and pack the sugar on as a paste, moistened with a spoonful of the cider or a little mustard.
- BastingCider and water in roughly equal parts, spooned over every 15 minutes. Sweet cider browns faster, so watch the last 20 minutes for scorching.
- Oven350°F is stated outright alongside 'moderate oven,' so there is no guessing required. An hour is right for a 10 to 14 lb ham that is already hot from the kettle; a cold, fully cooked ham wants closer to 15 minutes per pound.
- Yield and restingA whole bone-in ham of 12 to 14 lb serves 15 to 20. Rest it 20 minutes before carving, and keep the kettle liquid — it is excellent stock for bean or split pea soup, though taste it for salt first.
Boiling a ham before baking it is the older English practice, carried into American kitchens and kept alive by the saltiness of nineteenth-century cures: the kettle drew out brine that no oven could. The sugar-and-clove finish is just as old, and the studded diamond pattern was probably as much a piece of table display as a seasoning, since a glazed ham was a centrepiece meant to be carved in front of guests. Cider as a basting liquid points to a household with a barrel of it on hand, which in much of the northeastern United States was long ordinary.