The Country Ham Book

By Jeanne Voltz and Lynne Long

Good country ham is a delicacy that deserves to be in gourmet company. Dry cured with salt and other natural ingredients and aged to a rich intensity, true country ham boasts a flavor and texture that puts the more common wet-cured ham, which is soaked in brine or injected with a salt solution, to shame.

This book celebrates country ham's colorful culinary past and its continued close ties with life across the South. Jeanne Voltz and Elaine Harvell discuss the lore and history of country ham; walk the reader through buying, preparing, and serving a country ham; and present some 70 recipes for country ham and its accompaniments. The book also features a glossary and a list of sources for ordering country hams.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Jan 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781469624235

Jeanne Voltz

Jeanne Voltz is author of more than ten cookbooks, including Barbecued Ribs, Smoked Butts, and Other Great Feeds and The Flavor of the South.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Country ham brings a warm feeling of home to us; we grew up with it. It was festive food for holidays and celebrations. When we were children, a ham from the farm shared the table with turkey and chicken for weddings, family reunions, funerals, and church suppers. The hogs were raised on family farms, to be slaughtered and salted to individual preference. Elaine’s grandfather and Jeanne’s grandmothers had their formulas for curing: salt plus a pinch of saltpeter, with sweeteners and spices added according to taste. In most farmyards there was a smokehouse, where the hams were hung over smoldering fires for the aromatic finish smoke gives to cured meat. We enjoyed the excitement, the socializing, and some of the work of the hog killing.

As a result of curing and aging hams, marvelous new flavors and textures unlike those in any other food are created. The first taste of country ham is salty. The flavor is big and complex in the mouth. The texture is firm with a richness unrivaled by any other meat. Even the tiniest sliver of country ham contributes rich flavor to a simple dish.

After we were grown, this meat created by hard-working farmers and planters almost disappeared from stores. Anew kind of ham, called city ham by those who knew the farm-style classic, had appeared on the market. This new ham, which was soaked in brine for tenderness, was easy to cook and prepare. As more women took jobs outside the home, the convenience of hams that required no soaking and only a brief baking made the new hams popular. Festive dinners formerly centered around country hams carved to order were no longer in fashion.

The late James Beard once told Jeanne that a whole generation of Americans are growing up never knowing one of the most elegant of all American foods [diy-salt-cured ham]. We agree with Beard; great dry-salt-cured hams are a taste of America that deserves perpetuating, and we hope this book enables present and future generations to understand and enjoy this world-acclaimed meat.

After the city hams became dominant, finding country hams was almost impossible outside the ham-loving Southeast. But as hardcore ham lovers, we managed to obtain ham for holidays even if we had to have it shipped in. A shipping company driver delivering a ham in Los Angeles might be puzzled that we would have ham sent across the country. But if the courier was from the South, a box containing genuine country ham brought back memories of childhood meals. Today meat markets in the South order fine dry-salted hams and have them on display for holidays. In one North Carolina city in the summer of 1998, hams were advertised for the Fourth of July, and television commercials for old-fashioned Tennessee hams ran in the Atlanta market.

Dry-cured hams were a foundation of life in America, first as a commodity that was readily bought by the British, providing cash to the colonists. Eventually the taste for ham developed in the New World, and ham was daily fare at plantation and farm homes, particularly in the South, where preserving meat was most critical. A well-made ham survived the heat of summer and could sit on a table for hours with little worry about spoilage.

Some folks think of country hams as a chore to cook, requiring too much time and muscle. Yes, cooking a whole or large half of this style of ham takes time, but it offers a special convenience. Afterward, the cooked ham comes to the rescue for dozens of emergency meals and snacks for unexpected guests or for family when time and energy for cooking run out. Ham sliced and served with biscuits or on small pieces of bread makes a luncheon, an easy supper, or a substantial snack for drop-in guests. Ham bits sprinkled over a salad, soup, or stir-fry vegetables make everyday dishes special. Slices of cooked ham can be sautéed for breakfast or late-night suppers with eggs or fruit. The very best pleasure of fine ham may be the morsels shaved off for snacking. There truly is no waste.

A ham cooked for Christmas is a particular joy for New Year’s Day, with black-eyed peas and rice for luck as a relaxed ending to the holidays. A ham cooked for Easter can last through several batches of sandwiches or fruit-and-ham plates and may be shaved over springtime asparagus before Memorial Day. Summer ham cooked at night to avoid heating up the kitchen appears on plates with fresh tomatoes, bell peppers, melons, fruits, and crabmeat or other seafood (ham and crab is a great invention of fine cooks on the Eastern Shore of Maryland and Virginia).

We recognize that people who do not know the pleasures of country ham have not the vaguest idea of how to buy or cook it. This is understandable. Consulting early cookbooks, such as Mrs. Randolph’s, Eliza Leslie’s, or Amelia Simmons’s, we find scant mention of country ham cookery. The cooks of the first two centuries in the New World knew how to cook hams and did not normally use recipes. American girls’ schools were rare, and many women were not taught to read. Even in the twentieth century, few cookbooks and pamphlets, except those published by curers producing hams commercially, say much about this fine food of colonial America.

On our parents’ and grandparents’ farms we saw hogs grow fat and meaty, and we understood why a child eating a huge meal or taking the largest piece of pie was called a pig. When corn or kitchen scraps were poured into the feeding trough, the sow and her piglets pushed and shoved to get at the food. We have seen those animals turned into hams, bacon, and fresh cuts at slaughter time on our family farms.

Remembering summer meals with several grandchildren at the farm reminds us how important ham was. Sliced ham at breakfast with biscuits and grits often was the only meat of the day. Midday dinner consisted of as many as fifteen vegetables—everything that was ready for harvest in the garden—with hot cornbread, butter, milk, and iced tea to drink. Supper was anything left from dinner plus supplements such as berries, peaches, fresh figs, or homemade applesauce with cream skimmed off the milk. One or two chickens were killed for Sunday dinner.

Gretchen Johnson Corbett, Elaine’s aunt, remembers her mother’s morning routine. Breakfast was no hurry-up job for Mama. Every morning she baked fresh biscuits, fried sliced ham, and made redeye gravy and cooked grits. Elaine’s grandparents’ farm was next door, so the cherished grandchild ate at her grandmother’s often.

We do not propose going back to the cooking of a half-century ago. We feel that country ham has a place in modern cooking. We suggest ham for the holidays or special occasions. Guests adore it when it is properly carved. Jeanne introduced Californians to country ham and smoked turkey buffet. The ham was carved paper-thin and arranged beforehand on platters, covered, and refrigerated. The turkey smoked by her husband, Luther, also was sliced and put on its platters. Casseroles of scalloped potatoes or rice pilaf plus marinated cold asparagus, carrots, green peas and mushrooms, cranberry sauce, and other relishes accompanied the meats. Californians ate the ham and turkey with gusto. Some were anxious to learn new tastes, others recalled past meals in the South, and some were being polite. Their acceptance made the work worthwhile.

The National Country Ham Association reports that its members sell more than 3.5 million hams annually. Hams processed by non-members are difficult to track, but the hams sold by nonmembers may outnumber those marketed by members of the association. The ham-processing industry includes curers who offer a hundred or so hams a year as well as those who market hams by the thousands.

What started as family farm activity developed into an enterprise, with the younger generation taking over as the older generation retires at many of the large companies. In Smithfield, Virginia, ham processing is done by descendants of the founders of the firms and of village folk who worked with ham since the early days. Many ham curers in Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, the Carolinas, West Virginia, and Missouri learned their craft by trailing after their parents and grandparents through ham houses.

1: FOOD OF THE ANCIENTS

Our ancestors attempted to keep the larder filled through seasons of scarcity by salting and aging pork legs; it was the most successful method of preservation at that time. This great discovery came centuries before refrigeration, canning, or freezing was found to preserve food. Little did the inventors suspect that they were creating one of the most elegant of all meats, lifting an ordinary roast of pork to incredible heights. Beef, venison, lamb, and meats of other animals are salt cured, but none is transformed so dramatically as pork. The flavor of ham is as complex as that of fine wine. The flesh of pork cured with salt and saltpeter (nitrate) turns pink to deep mahogany red. The tender meat becomes firm enough to hold a shape when folded into a biscuit or rolled around a piece of fruit or an asparagus spear.

Before the sciences of food technology and livestock husbandry were developed, methods of food preservation included drying, perhaps pickling in vinegar and brines, and not much else. Transportation between settlements was too slow and cumbersome to provide fresh fare or to help supplement menus when local supplies were scarce.

Pork is one of the most ancient meats. To pinpoint when, where, and how pork was first salt cured is impossible, though food historian Reay Tannahill, in her book Food in History, noted a definite link in early Egypt between the efficiency of salt in embalming the bodies of the dead and its use in preserving food for the living. Fossils found in Europe and Asia indicate that wild, pig-like animals rooted around forests and swamps 40 million years ago. Swine were domesticated in China by 4900 B.C. and were raised for meat in Europe by 1500 B.C.

Not until the time of the