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September 16
Menu: Baked Ham; Baked Potatoes Brussels Sprouts; Spiced Grapes Apple Salad; Ice Cream with Kisses; Coffee Baked Ham-Soak ham over night then wash and scrape it. Put it into cold water; let it come to boiling point then simmer for 2 hours. Let the ham cool in the water; then remove and draw off the skin. Bake in moderate oven for 2 hours; baste it frequently; using 1 cup of sherry wine, 2 spoonfuls at a time; then baste with melted Crisco. When done, cover with a paste made of browned flour and browned sugar moistened with sherry, and return to oven to brown,
A two-stage ham — simmered, then baked with a sherry glaze — written for a dry-salt-cured whole ham of a kind now sold mainly by specialty curers. Most of the adjustments below come from the fact that the ham in your supermarket is a different object from the one this recipe assumes.
- The overnight soakThis step exists to draw salt out of a heavily dry-cured country ham. A modern wet-cured supermarket ham, city ham or spiral-cut ham is mildly salted and usually already fully cooked; soaking it does nothing but waterlog the meat. Skip the soak and the simmer entirely for those, and go straight to the bake. Keep both steps only if you have a genuine salt-cured country ham.
- Weight and timingThe recipe gives no size. Two hours of simmering plus two hours of baking suits a bone-in half or small whole ham of roughly 8 to 12 lb. A country ham of 15 lb or more needs closer to 20 to 25 minutes per pound in the simmering water.
- Moderate oven350°F. If the browned-flour paste at the end starts to scorch, drop to 325°F for the final browning.
- Internal temperatureCook to 145°F at the thickest point, away from the bone, for a raw cured ham; a pre-cooked ham only needs reheating to 140°F. The four hours of total cooking here will comfortably overshoot both on a small ham, so use a thermometer rather than the clock.
- Cooling in the waterDo not leave the ham to cool on the counter all day. Cool it in its liquid only until it can be handled — an hour or so — then skin it and get it into the oven, or refrigerate the whole pot if you are breaking the work across two days.
- Crisco for bastingCrisco was new when this book was printed and the basting instruction is partly advertising. Any neutral fat works, and the ham's own rendered fat, spooned from the pan, works better than either.
- The browned-flour pasteToast plain flour and granulated sugar separately in a dry pan until each smells nutty and turns tan, then moisten with sherry to a spreadable paste. Browning the flour first kills the raw-paste taste; browning the sugar gives the crust its colour without waiting for it to caramelise in the oven. Roughly 1/2 cup flour to 1/2 cup sugar coats a 10 lb ham.
- YieldA 10 lb bone-in ham serves 12 to 15 at table, with plenty left for sandwiches and for the bean or pea soup a ham bone was commonly used for.
This page comes from a promotional cookbook issued by Procter & Gamble after Crisco went on sale in 1911 — the first hydrogenated vegetable shortening marketed as a general household fat — which is why a traditional baked ham is being basted with shortening rather than butter or its own drippings. The recipe itself is much older than the product: simmering a hard salt-cured ham, skinning it, then finishing it in the oven under a sweet crust is standard nineteenth-century American practice, and the sherry basting marks it as a company dish rather than everyday food. It sits in the book's "Calendar of Dinners," a day-by-day menu scheme meant to spare the housekeeper the daily question of what to serve; the stray "Coffee" in the heading and the "Oyster Bisque" trailing at the end are the neighbouring lines of that calendar, not part of the ham. The browned-flour-and-sugar paste is a period alternative to the studded-clove-and-brown-sugar glaze, and it produces a firmer, more crumb-like crust than a wet glaze does.