Beef Hams, to Cure
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the cure
Cut the leg of beef like a ham.
Mix bay salt, saltpetre, common salt, and coarse sugar.
Rub the mixture into the meat thoroughly.
Cure and smoke
Baste the meat with the pickle daily for a month.
After a month, roll the meat in bran or sawdust.
Hang the meat in wood smoke for another month in a cool place.
Serve
Slice the ham and serve with poached eggs.
Or boil the ham to eat cold.
Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.
Explore the science
What each ingredient does
- Fat scotch or welsh ox leg
- Forms the large piece of meat that is cured into ham.
- Common salt
- Draws out moisture and seasons the meat during curing.
- Saltpetre
- Helps preserve the meat and gives it its characteristic cured colour.
- Bay salt
- Adds coarse salinity that penetrates the meat during the cure.
- Coarse sugar
- Balances the saltiness and adds mild sweetness to the cure.
The step that matters
Rubbing the cure in thoroughly. Salt and saltpetre only preserve the meat where they reach. Uneven rubbing leaves untreated areas that can spoil during the long cure, so the mixture must cover the whole surface and be reapplied through basting.
“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.
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