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Roast Ham, Virginia Style
1 ham about 8 to 10 pounds 1 cup Karo, Blue Label 1 tablespoon pickle spice Cloves Dry bread crumbs
This is an ingredient list without a method, typical of the promotional booklets of the period, which assumed the cook already knew how to bake a ham. The quantities tell you what is intended: a spice-simmered ham finished with a syrup-and-crumb crust.
- Karo Blue LabelKaro was sold in colour-coded grades, Blue Label being one of the lighter ones; light corn syrup is the nearest modern equivalent, though the grades and their formulas changed over the years. One cup is enough glaze for a 10 lb ham with a little to spare.
- Pickle spiceThis is mixed pickling spice — mustard seed, coriander, allspice, bay, chilli, dill seed, in varying proportions. It belongs in the simmering water, not on the surface; tie it in cloth or use a strainer.
- What kind of hamA ham in this period was cured and usually not cooked, which is why spices are on the list at all. A supermarket "ham" today is already fully cooked and wet-cured, and needs only reheating. A genuine dry-cured Virginia or Smithfield country ham still needs long soaking, then simmering, before it sees an oven.
- The two-stage methodThe implied sequence is simmer with the pickle spice until tender, then skin, score the fat in diamonds, stud the intersections with whole cloves, brush with the syrup, press on dry bread crumbs, and brown in the oven. The crumbs are the glaze's body — without them the syrup slides off.
- Oven temperatureThe booklet gives none. For the browning stage, 400F for 15 to 20 minutes is enough to set the crust; longer and the crumbs and cloves scorch. If you are baking an uncooked cured ham through rather than simmering it, 325F is the working figure.
- Internal temperatureUse a thermometer rather than time. An uncooked cured ham is done at 145F in the thickest part away from the bone; a ready-to-eat ham needs only 140F to be hot through.
- ClovesWhole cloves, one per scored diamond, and pushed in far enough to stay put. They are removed before eating — a clove bitten whole is unpleasantly numbing.
- YieldAn 8 to 10 lb bone-in ham serves 12 to 16 at table, with a good deal left for cold slicing and sandwiches, which was much of the point of buying one this size.
Virginia ham means, strictly, a hog cured with dry salt and long aged, the style associated above all with Smithfield, where the name has been protected by state law since the twentieth century. Such hams are dense, deeply salty and mahogany-coloured, and traditionally required soaking and simmering before roasting — the reason a recipe like this one starts with pickling spice rather than with an oven. The crumb finish is old practice — crumbing, or "raspings", on a baked ham is documented well before booklets of this kind — but the corn syrup is the manufacturer's touch: such booklets were published by syrup, starch and shortening companies to show housewives new uses for a branded product, and the specification of Karo by label colour rather than simply "corn syrup" is the tell. What survives from the older tradition here is the clove-studded, scored fat, a decorative treatment for baked ham that appears widely in European cookery.