Fall is the time to preserve meat. In the days before refrigeration you could kill an animal, hang it to cool, and process it in the cool weather. (Try cutting a piece of warm raw meat, you’ll get the point.)
We haven’t butchered our own meat in years, but this year I was talking about it with my mom and dad. Nostalgia for the good ol’ days impelled me to cure a ham.
I got a 17 pound fresh ham from Egolf’s IGA in Churubusco. If you’ve never seen a fresh ham, it looks like a big ol’ roast:
You take that fresh ham, and rub it all over with salt (a pound for a ham this size), pepper, brown sugar, and saltpeter:
After carefully packing the spice mixture around the bone, under the skin, and all over, you wrap in brown paper. I tied it with kitchen twine because I was doing it by myself and in the next step having the twine holding it together will be handy:
Then you put it in a muslin sack. It’s important to keep it wrapped in the brown paper to keep the salt around the ham. That’s why I tied it up, so as I wrestled it into the sack the brown paper wouldn’t come undone. My mom gave me the sacks, they’re old clover seed sacks. You could make one out of a couple of kitchen towels if you’re short on clover seed sacks:
Then you hang it in a dry dark space until August. (Yes, this is November. It hangs for 9 months.) Hang it somewhere where the varmints won’t get it. This is hanging from a beam in my garage. It’ll drip (ewww) so don’t hang it over anything.
Check back in August 2009 and we’ll dine!
Now you too can sing:
“Hey I’m a country man a city boy can’t do the things I can
I can grow my own groceries and salt cure a ham
Hey baby I’m a country man”
A song by Luke Bryan, in case you don’t listen to country music radio.
An update as of June 7th. The ham is hard as a rock, which is a good thing. The idea is to desiccate it with the salt and saltpeter. It’s hung in our garage where you’ll hit your head on it if you’re not paying attention, and both Deb and I can attest it is getting hard.
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