I try, dear friends, I really try not to be one of those Insufferable Food People, but every once in a while -- "once in a while" being defined as "never more than once every 17 minutes" -- insufferability catches up with me. Usually it arrives in the form of some little piece of meaningless trivia that has significance to no one but me, and maybe a dozen similarly finicky souls. The example that springs to mind is a time about four years ago, when I was visiting my parents, hunkered down in front of the teevee with my mom, glasses of wine and plates of bread and cheese at the ready. En route to the weekend PBS cooking shows, we ran into an ad for Colombian coffee. The ad depicts a black-turtleneck-clad, spiky-haired, hipster-glasses-wearing guy, in front of a line at a Starbucks-ish place, intoning nasally to the barista, "I'll have a double tall skim latte with Madagascar cinnamon and a whisper of fat-free cocoa." My backbone shot straight up; I pointed at the screen and announced in a loud voice, "Now, you see, that's bullshit, because you don't get cinnamon from Madagascar. You get vanilla from Madagascar. Cinnamon comes from China, Sri Lanka or Vietnam." My mom looked at me for a moment, then launched into a riff on the "Springfield Squares" moment from The Simpsons, deploying her best Schwarzeneggerian/Rainier Wolfcastle voice: "My daughter returns from a fancy East Coast culinary school and I am horrified to discover she has turned into a NERD." (For you Simpsons fans out there, yes, I played along: I replied, "I'm laughing already!," and Mom answered, "It is not a comedy."
I had thought that I finally put away these childish things, this impulse to loudly correct throwaway jokes in dopey advertisements, but apparently I have not. Watching one of the few shows on the Food Network that does not make me want to drive a fork into my own head until the hurting stops (no, I'm not telling; can you guess what it is? Come on, it's fun!), I see an ad for a cholesterol medication called Vytorin. Whether Vytorin does what Merck claims it does, I don't know. I do know that the ad agency that designed this campaign is fascinated by the news that cholesterol doesn't just occur in food; no, your body makes cholesterol, too! And how much your body makes is largely determined by your family history! I was willing to grant them one corny joke ("it's that foot-long frank, and your grandpa Frank!", but as soon as the announcer moved on to "it's that Virginia ham...and your Aunt Ginny!", my backbone went right up. It wasn't that the joke was corny, or the ad was silly; they were, on both counts. No, I'm slapping poor Merck around because the ham in the ad was an iconic ham: scored, cloved, glazed to a near-blinding gloss, perfect pink meat, semi-boneless. A fine ham it might have been; a Virginia ham, it wasn't.
How I wish I had saved the back issue of Saveur that has a side-by-side comparison of city ham (i.e. the ham in the Vytorin advert, or what most of us think of when we think of ham), and country ham (i.e. a true Virginia ham, particularly those produced in the city of Smithfield). City ham is the most widely available in the U.S., cured via a "wet cure," or injection of a brine solution. Quality can vary -- some producers inject additional water into their hams to increase the sell weight and reduce the saltiness of the curing brine - but the best ones are plump, tender, flavorful and just right for a sandwich made on soft mild bread and spread with a thick layer of mustard. This is the ham that my parents served on Christmas Eve, along with the spiced beef I make every year. My stepdad, whose grandfather owned a meat shop in southern New Jersey, and who has an unerring eye for first-rate ham, brought home a real beauty. I was put to work on scoring and cloving duty while he blended together a glaze of brown sugar, maple syrup, rum and fresh-squeezed orange juice. On the spoon, it was great stuff; on the ham, it was magnificent. I would have stolen the leftovers and brought them back to New York with us, but I had already made plans for a ham of our own, even though our ham would be a whole 'nother thing.
Unlike city ham, country ham is dry-cured. The process varies depending on the region in which you find your ham, but the basic curing procedures are similar: the ham is chilled, salted, rubbed with a curing solution and hung to dry from six months to two years. Prosciutto and jambon Serrano are both examples of country ham, as is the star of our New Year's Eve dinner, the mighty Smithfield ham. The Smithfield ham is saltier and spicier than prosciutto, which is cured with an unspiced, relatively lower-salt cure that accentuates the meat's sweetness. Smithfield ham, which by law must come from a razorback hog raised in Virginia or North Carolina and cured within the town of Smithfield (a requirement to feed the hogs exclusively on peanuts was dropped in 1968, but the best ones are still peanut-fed), is chilled, salted, left for seven days, rinsed, resalted and left for 21 days, rinsed, rubbed with a dry cure and hung from six months to two years. They are available smoked or unsmoked; the smoked ones are smoked for two weeks. Like prosciutto, Smithfield ham can be eaten uncooked; unlike prosciutto, Smithfield ham is better cooked, at least to me; plus, if you cook it, you get to indulge in the whole ritual of unwrapping it from its linen sack, which covers a white paper wrapping, which in turn covers the mesh bag in which the ham was hung. Unwrapping a Smithfield ham is just plain fun.
I had read about Smithfield ham for years, intrigued by the idea of a peanut-fed hog, as well as by Lora Brody's description of them as a "second mortgage ham." I finally decided to take the plunge after finding them hanging in the window of a meat market in Chinatown. (I was surprised to find them there until I learned via Eileen Yin-Fei Lo that Smithfield ham is a good substitute for Chinese Yunnan or Jinhua hams, both of which are unavailable in the U.S.) The first time was more than a little nervewracking: I'd bought an unsmoked 17-pound leg; it was big and expensive, and I was out of my element. I schlepped it down to my parents' house, scrubbed off the few bits of mold with a stiff brush, washed off the peppery cure, soaked it for 24 hours and baked it in a covered roaster with an inch of water in the bottom. The result was tasty, but chewy to my city-ham-eating palate, and very, very salty. We spent months seasoning our scrambled eggs and fried rice with little slivers of strong meat. I wondered if I could do it again, and do it better.
I have since learned that the cooking instructions on the back of the linen sack err on the side of undersoaking. This year I bought a 6-pound smoked picnic shoulder and soaked it for three days, changing the water twice a day. As the hoppin' John simmered in a covered enameled cast-iron Dutch oven on top of the stove, I put the ham in the roasting pan, added the water, covered it with foil, baked it for 2 hours, and just knew that I was on the way to something good. When the ham was done, I took it out, sliced off the skin and the fat underneath, a tedious but necessary process (because of the salt content, the skin never achieves the crackling yumminess that you usually get from pork), made a glaze just like the one my stepdad made on Christmas Eve, rubbed it all over the ham and sent it back to the oven for an hour. When it was ready, when the hoppin' John was done, when the biscuits were out of the oven, I took a couple of slices, split open a couple of biscuits, and took a deep breath.
This is not a good sandwich ham. Save your bread and mustard for something else. There is a reason that biscuits are the traditional accompaniment to Smithfield ham: they are simply perfect. Leftover ham is very nice when diced and added to scrambled eggs, and even better when slivered and added to leftover hoppin' John, but it's best of all with a whole new batch of biscuits. *This* is Virginia ham.
The information elves at Wikipedia have a good overview of different varieties of ham. Further entertaining reading on Smithfield ham can be found here, here, and here.