More Karo
Scrub the ham with cold water containing a little baking soda. rinse in cold water and place in a kettle with the Karo and pickle spice. Cover with boiling water and simmer until tender -about four hours. Let stand in the water two hours. Pare off the skin, brush with Karo, sprinkle thickly with the crumbs and dot with the cloves at even intervals. Bake one and one-half hours in a slow oven, basting frequently.
A whole cured ham, simmered then glazed and baked. The original assumes a heavily salted, uncooked ham hung in a smokehouse, which is why it opens with a scrub and a four-hour simmer.
- The ham it was written forThis was written for a dry-cured, smoked, uncooked ham of the kind now sold as country ham; the recipe gives no weight. Most supermarket hams today are wet-cured and sold fully cooked, so the long simmer and the soda scrub serve little purpose and risk leaving the meat stringy.
- KaroKaro is corn syrup; the light (clear) style is what these promotional recipes generally meant. No quantity is given here, which is typical of the book's format, so the amount is left to the cook's judgement.
- Unmeasured throughoutBeyond the Karo, the pickle spice, crumbs and cloves are all left to judgement. Mixed pickling spice was sold loose by the ounce, and the quantity for the simmering water is left entirely to the cook.
- Slow ovenRoughly 275-325F. At that sort of heat an hour and a half of basting is about right for setting a crumb crust on the simmered ham without scorching the sugar.
- Standing in the waterThe two hours off the heat is not idleness: cooling in the cooking liquid keeps the meat from drying out. Do not skip it and do not hurry it with cold water.
- CrumbsDry, fine breadcrumbs, not fresh; fresh crumbs go soggy in the syrup and slide off. Cracker crumbs, and crumbs mixed with brown sugar, appear in other ham recipes for the same purpose.
- Doneness, not the clockJudge the simmer by feel and temperature rather than by four hours. The meat should pull easily from the bone and the interior should read 160F on a thermometer.
- ServingA whole ham of this kind yields a great many servings and keeps for cold eating afterwards. Carve in thin slices.
Karo corn syrup was introduced by the Corn Products Refining Company in the early twentieth century, and the little books issued under its name — of which this is one — were written to find the syrup as many jobs as possible in an American kitchen that already had sugar, molasses and honey. Hence a glazed ham, where corn syrup does two things sugar does less neatly: it goes into the simmering water, and it brushes on as a tacky, non-crystallising layer that holds the crumbs. Boiling a country ham and then finishing it in the oven with a crumb or sugar crust was long-established American practice by then, dating to the era when a home-cured ham hung all winter and needed hours of gentle cooking to become edible. The soda scrub in the first line is the tell: that step was for washing mould and surface salt off a smokehouse ham, a chore that mattered less once commercial mild-cured hams took over.