Ham , livre ebook

CONTENTS
FRONT END THIS LITTLE PIGGY WENT TO MARKET
1 FRESH HAM
BIT OF A JOINT?
THE ASIAN CONNECTION
2 DRY-CURED HAM IN THE OLD WORLD
THE LIST: EUROPE ON A PLATE
THE BEST COCKTAIL PARTY EVER
NOSHES
MEALS
3 DRY-CURED HAM IN THE NEW WORLD
THE BUTTON BUSTERS
NEW TAKES FOR COUNTRY HAM STEAKS
GLORIOUS LEFTOVERS
4 WET-CURED HAM
DO TRY THIS AT HOME
SMOKED
NOT SMOKED
JAMBON PERSILL : HAM S COUP DE GR CE
TAIL END THIS LITTLE PIGGY WENT ALL THE WAY HOME
SOURCE GUIDE
CONVERSION CHART
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INDEX OF SEARCHABLE TERMS
Ours is a mixed marriage. I m a Southerner from sharecroppers and Civil War soldiers; Bruce is a New Yorker from Torah scribes and kosher butchers. It all works because Baptists eroticize Jews and Jews eroticize ham.
It also works because after fifteen cookbooks together (not counting the ones for persnickety celebrities who insist on confidentiality agreements), we have a distinct division of labor: He cooks, and I write.
It s not that I don t cook. One look at me and you know I shan t starve. And it s not that we don t conceptualize the recipes together. Some of our best fights have been over brown sugar.
Look, I find it can add a cloying gooeyness to chocolate. Not always, mind you. Just sometimes.
And Bruce? The more brown sugar, the better.
So in the middle of concepting out the recipes for The Ultimate Brownie Book , right on the busy corner of 7th Avenue and 21st Street in New York City, we descended into a full-throttle yellfest that included such delights as you don t understand a thing about baking and you never value anything I say.
Just as things were getting really dire, Bruce s seventy-something shrink walked by. (These things can only happen in New York.)
You boys OK? she asked.
We both nodded and took a breath.
See you Tuesday, she said to Bruce as she crossed the street.
We paused a beat and went right back at it.
Anyway, our division of labor has come about because of our backgrounds: He once studied cheffery at Johnson and Wales, and I once taught freshman English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
So for the past decade, Bruce has been in the kitchen, trying out new ideas, new techniques-a steady stream of dishes. He likes to play with his food. And since nothing gives him more pleasure than roasting meat, this book was his joy: sweating joints all day long. He bustled through the recipes, humming and happy. Ever busy, he s the one with the Protestant work ethic. Don t get me started. I, a true son of the South, prefer to laze about on my ample ass reading novels.
One June morning, after a grueling session with Henry James, I walked into the kitchen to find him pan-frying a whole ham (for the results, see Jam n del Pa s , this page ). Later, after spending an hour in a Flannery O Connor chat room, I caught him trying to shove a twenty-four-pound ham into a ten-gallon tub. And around Thanksgiving, when I was putting together a series of highbrow Auden poems to read before the meal, I watched in horror as he shaved the mold off a country ham.
Perhaps I m getting ahead of myself. Beyond writing, my other role in this culinary circus is to research our more arcane interests in food. And that innate curiosity is really how these two little piggies went to market to buy more hams than you can imagine.
It started like this: One afternoon in late winter, I found myself reading some fascinating websites about American country ham. (You toggle your browser fast enough between Eudora Welty and porn, and it ll happen to you, too.) To be honest, I hadn t thought much about ham. Sure, when I was a kid, it showed up at every holiday that marked the coming or going of the Messiah. But a ham was otherwise a blank centerpiece: sort of like a turkey but with more provenance, more Southern atmospherics, more cultural foofaraw, as well as an aggressive, in-your-face meatiness, proving all that pretension was nothing but folderol.
It wasn t that I knew zilch about ham. For one thing, I d been on way too many press trips and always dreaded that moment when some PR shill would open her eyes really wide and say, Now we get to taste the ham. It s always the climax of the prescribed food tour-and of almost every travel show, too, from Rick Steves s I m-right-on-schedule adventures to Anthony Bourdain s slouched ramblings: Ah, the ham of blah-blah-blah that s smoked over thus-and-such from pigs who only eat this-and-that.
And no wonder. Ham is succulent and sweet, an Easter lunch as well as a summer picnic, a winter dinner and a barbecue favorite, good on sandwiches, great on pizza. It s the subject (or object) of rifle shoots in New England, cook-offs in Kansas City, and a host of culinary fetishes-some written, some photographed, and some better left undocumented.
As I trawled the websites that afternoon, I was again struck by how ham is such global fare-a local icon, a national treasure, a talisman of terroir : Italian prosciutto crudo , Portuguese presunto , Basque jambon de Bayonne , Chinese Jinhua hams. By one count, there are more laws governing the production of the various jam n in Spain than there are those covering that nation s transportation network.
Soon enough, I scraped back my chair, roused the collie, and ambled into the kitchen, where Bruce was emptying the dishwasher. (Ah, marriage.) What do you think about ham? I asked.
Other than liking it?
No, I mean, what do you know about it?
Bruce launched into a discussion of brines, of curing-but soon got tangled up in smoked versus unsmoked, wet versus dry, nitrates versus not, American versus European, and so forth.
There s a lot to it, he finally said.
I d like to know more.
He nodded.
Don t be scared, I added. I once told him I wanted to eat never-been-frozen shrimp, and we ended up on a 2,500-mile car trip to Newfoundland.
I m not.
You used to be. Another time I told him I didn t want to sit around all summer in the East Coast heat, and we somehow landed in Morocco.
After thirteen years together, I m immune to it.
They re giving shots for everything these days.
OK, he was game. But first things first. If we were going to get anywhere, we had to nail down a definition of ham. In general, that is. What is ham?
We frothed up a couple late-afternoon lattes, got down a shelf of culinary reference books, and hammered out this definition:
Composed of four muscles, a ham is one back haunch (the butt cheek, if you will) and upper back leg down to the shank (the shin, in butcher parlance) of a pig, boar, shoat, or other porcine-ish animal . (For a diagram, see this page .)
From this followed three immediate conclusions:
Every pig or pig-ish animal has two hams .
A ham need not be smoked or cured in any way .
The haunch of any other animal is not a ham .
During the ensuing months, we came across other backsides referred to as hams, but these seemed to violate the spirit of the word. Yes, you can make deer or elk prosciutto from their haunches, and you can make duck prosciutto from a duck breast, but you d never call a duck breast a ham. The product does not define the producer. Otherwise, my parents would be gay.
We also committed to one self-imposed limitation:
We re only dealing with pigs .
Yes, wild boars do produce hams. But when s the last time you saw a wild-boar ham in your supermarket? (Don t answer that if you live in New York City.)
And finally, this:
The front shoulder of a pig is not a ham .
These fatty quarters have recently been relabeled picnic hams, probably to get away from their less poetic (and equally confusing) traditional name: Boston butts. They do indeed make the best pulled pork, but they are not hams in the strict sense of the word.
By ham, we mean the hindquarter, the joint that becomes Italian prosciutto crudo and Spanish jam n ib rico , the meat that comes to the table at a holiday meal-sometimes with those nasty canned pineapple rings and maraschino cherries stapled to it, sometimes tarted up with canned soda and unspeakable marinades, but many times just on its own: gloriously simple, smoked or not, cured or not-a large cut of pork, the ultimate roast.
Since that first fateful day, to uncover this hidden-in-plain-sight pleasure, Bruce and I have endured refrigerators full of ham leftovers, with hunks of pork being delivered by UPS every afternoon; I ve been to northern Kentucky in the dead of freeze-butt winter; both of us have been to a ramshackle slaughterhouse in rural Massachusetts; and we have borne witness to an enormous toe-on pig leg in our back refrigerator, a swarm of maggots in a French charcuterie, and a group of chic New Yorkers eating a quivering pile of ham in jelly. And we ve both clocked a million miles on a treadmill trying to work it all off.
At the end of all that, we were finally ready to give ham its proper due-even if we had to start by killing a pig.

GLAZED FRESH HAM

EUROPEAN DRY-CURED HAM

AMERICAN COUNTRY HAM

WET-CURED HAM
To call it an abattoir would be way too generous, about like calling a hedge fund manager a genius. It was just somebody s yard. Ed s. No last name given. He processed meat in a few outback buildings among the usual accoutrements of country life: a busted-out pickup, a doorless refrigerator, an upholstered couch on the back porch. And no amount of Michael Pollan-induced romanticism or Alice Waters localer-than-thou hype could make the place anything more than it was.
We got here the long way. That is, the idealistic way. When Bruce and I set out to discover what we could about ham, the first thing we decided was that we wanted to own a pig. What we failed to realize was that we d have to kill it, too.
About four months before our trip to Ed s, we had approached Dan and Tracy Hayhurst, who run Chubby Bunny Farm, our CSA (Community Supported Agriculture). Every year, we buy shares in their farm, then all summer eat the organic harvest from their pictur