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Baked Spiced Ham
Soak the ham over night in cold water; next morning wash and scrape it well; put in a large kettle, cover with cold water and bring slowly to the boil; add one teaspoonful of whole cloves and one teaspoonful of pepper corns tied up in thin muslin, and, unless the ham is a very small one, boil slowly for two hours; take from the water and pull off the skin; put in a pan in a moderate oven and bake for two hours, basting frequently; use a cupful of Madeira or sherry, a little at a time, until it is all used, then baste with the drippings in the pan. Fifteen minutes before taking it from the oven sprinkle thickly with brown sugar and let brown.
Serve hot or cold.
This assumes a whole dry-salt-cured ham of 12 to 15 lb, the kind that arrived hard, salty and skin-on. Almost every step is calibrated to that, so the first decision is what ham you actually have.
- The overnight soak is for a dry-cured ham onlyA country ham or other dry-salt ham needs the soak and the scrub to draw out salt and surface mould. A modern supermarket ham is wet-cured, mild and usually fully cooked; soaking and two hours of boiling will leave it grey and watery. If that is what you have, skip straight to a glazed bake.
- Boil slowly means a bare simmerWater at a rolling boil squeezes the muscle and tightens the meat. Hold it at 180-190F, barely trembling, for the two hours.
- Thin muslinA square of cheesecloth tied with string, or a tea ball. The point is to keep whole cloves and peppercorns out of the meat's surface while their oils go into the water.
- Moderate ovenAround 350F; the book gives no figure, and period 'moderate' covers roughly 325-375F. Four hours of total cooking is generous by current practice; go by temperature rather than the clock, pulling a dry-cured ham at about 155F internal and a wet-cured one at 140F.
- Skin the ham while it is hotStraight from the kettle the skin peels away in sheets and the fat underneath is soft enough to score. Let it cool and you will be cutting it off in pieces. Leave a good quarter-inch of fat for basting.
- The wine bastingA cupful of Madeira or sherry, applied a few spoonfuls at a time over the first hour and a half, gives a lacquered surface as the sugars in the fortified wine reduce. Use a medium-dry style; a cream sherry will scorch before the ham is done.
- The sugar crustBrown sugar sprinkled on at the end and left too long turns bitter. Fifteen minutes at 350F is about right; if it has not taken colour, a minute or two under the broiler with the door open will finish it.
- YieldA ham this size serves 20 or more hot, and rather more sliced thin when cold. The recipe assumes leftovers were the whole point.
Boiling a ham and then baking it is the older English method, and it survives in American cookbooks of this period because the hams themselves demanded it: a farm ham cured in salt and hung for months was too salty and too firm to go into the oven directly. The kettle drew out salt and cooked the meat through, the oven supplied the crust. The Madeira and sherry basting marks the dish as a company piece rather than everyday fare, and fortified wine with cured pork is a pairing often linked to the colonial Madeira trade. Commercial packers were by this era beginning to sell milder, faster-cured hams, which in time made the long preliminary boil less of a necessity.