Uncle Billy's Homemade Hams
The Perfect Cure
By Joel Bourne
Mother Earth News, Dec/Jan 1992
My first memory of Uncle Bill Long's ham goes back to a
Christmas dinner long ago. I was a shirttail boy of eight, and my
family had been invited to Uncle Billy's big white farmhouse near
Garysburg, North Carolina. There, among 30 or 40 relatives, we
lined up (children first) to cruise the sideboard, plates in hand,
and help ourselves to my aunt's Southern cooking. I remember squash
casserole, candied yams, butterbeans and snaps, and collards boiled
hard and long into a wonderful deep green mush. There was turkey
with oyster dressing and cranberry salad, rice and gravy, and hot
rolls for dipping and shoving. The desserts were nearby: plum
pudding and fruitcake, ambrosia and pecan pie, and, of course, my
Aunt June's legendary caramel cake, which had faithful fans in
three countries.
Reigning over the sideboard like King Solomon on his throne
was a ham cured by Uncle Billy. Deep red on the inside, covered
with cloves and a mahogany glaze of molasses and brown sugar on the
outside, its aroma filled the dining room. I remember nearly
transparent slices, rimmed with thin strips of fat, on a white
dinner plate. With my mouth watering and my eyes already feasting,
my ears turned deaf to my mother's warnings not to eat too much
because "it would give us children bad dreams." (After one
Christmas ham-eating binge, legend has it that my cousin Henry
awoke among ripped sheets and tossed blankets.) This was strong
stuff, I was told--an acquired, grown-up taste, like okra or good
bourbon.
I ate too much anyway. I still remember taking small forkfuls
of the ham (a taste that can only be described now as dark, hard,
and mysterious, and smacking of salt, smoke, and spices), carefully
lacing it between bits of soft rolls, and then dousing the whole
thing with red-eye gravy. A native of ham country (smoked hams from
places like Gwaltney and Smithfield have made the area famous), I
feel justified to state--unequivocally and with all prejudices
firmly in place--that my Uncle Billy makes the best country ham in
the world. A modest man of 64 and a churchgoer, he would scoff at
such praise--but he wouldn't deny it. He learned it from his
mother, Caroline, when he was a boy, and he's been doing it
steadily, almost as a revival, for the last 15 years. And like all
things he cherishes from a simpler time (including his Model A
pickup or his 1935 meat slicer), Uncle Billy's happy to tell you
all about it--just as long as you're happy to listen.
When I went to visit him early this fall, the farm was
bustling with activity. Cousin Duna's wedding was set for the
following weekend, and the whole family of six girls, several
husbands, and numerous grandchildren were working in the yard
getting ready for it. I found Uncle Billy behind the house wiring
lights to one of the half-dozen outbuildings scattered around the
place.
"So you want to know about hams," he said, in all seriousness.
"Well, I tell you. The key to keeping good hams...is to keep your
smokehouse locked." He leads the way down a path in the yard,
shooing tame ducks from underfoot, to where two small buildings
back up to a soybean field. He tells me about how, every January
when he was a boy, they'd kill 30 to 40 hogs fattened on corn and
peanuts to feed the family and the farmhands. It was the social
event of the season, and all the people who worked and lived on the
farm turned out to help. The men did the butchering, the women took
care of the organs and scraps to make chit'lins and sausage, and
the children tried not to get in the way. Nothing was wasted or
thrown away, not even the hair, which was saved for stuffing
mattresses or making plaster. "We used to say you used everything
but the squeal," laughs Uncle Billy. These days, however, he buys
fresh "green" hams from a local slaughterhouse.
We stop in front of the salt house, a cinder-block building
with plaster walls and tables to one side. The door is heavy,
thick, and insulated. As with so much else on a farm, says Uncle
Billy, the first thing you need for successful ham-curing is the
right weather--a cold snap in January with temperatures in the high
20s to low 30s at night. He brings the green hams into the salt
house and lays them on the table. Meat cools just like it cooks,
from the outside in, he says, and the meat has to drop to about
40øF next to the bone, a process that usually takes overnight. When
it's cold, he explains, the fat stays solid. The next morning he
pours a layer of salt on the table and begins to cover the meat
with it, rubbing it in, moving the joints, adding more salt until
it "starts feelin' stiff." For his annual 24 hams, he buys 50 to
100 pounds of salt.
A ham has two sides, the skin side and the fresh-meat side.
When he finishes working the meat, he lays it on the table
skin-side down and covers it with a layer of salt one-half inch to
an inch deep. "When it's blood-red fresh, it has a tremendous
amount of moisture," Uncle Billy says. "The salt is going to
penetrate the meat quickly. And don't forget: The meat will absorb
the salt until it reaches equilibrium. The first few days are
critical until the salt gets to the bone. When the humidity is
high, it's ideal. As it penetrates the meat that salt will
disappear like melting snow."
Four things influence the salting process: the thickness of
the meat, the moisture of the meat, the humidity of the air, and
the temperature. Since it's tough to control the temperature and
humidity, the salt house was built with thick walls and insulation
to trap the cold inside.
After the initial salting, Uncle Billy goes back to the salt
house three or four days later and adds another layer of salt,
working
the joints again to help it penetrate. He returns again seven
or eight days later and repeats the process, then leaves the hams
in the salt house for most of February. He stresses that cold
dampness is what you need. If there are a few bluebird eggs in
February, which is not uncommon in North Carolina, he'll bring
several 100-pound blocks of ice into the salt house to keep the ham
cold until the weather returns to normal.
"After four to five weeks, the salt content is stabilized--the
same at the surface as at the center," Uncle Billy says. "Then you
have preserved your meat. You could hang it on the back porch and
it would be fine all summer."
Salt may preserve a ham, but smoking makes it worth eating. In
early March, Uncle Billy takes the hams from the salt house, fills
a metal washtub with warm water, and washes them "just like a
baby." He then mixes borax (found in the detergent section of your
local grocer) and black pepper at a ratio of about a half can of
pepper to a 32-ounce box of detergent, although he won't admit to
exact measures. "I just mix it in till it looks right, like that,"
he says, showing me the box of soap flecked with black specks of
pepper. It usually takes 10 to 12 boxes of borax and six cans of
pepper. He covers the hams with a thin coat of the mixture, which
toughens the skin to keep bugs out. Next, he takes a can of crushed
red pepper and pours it on the exposed hock until the whole end of
the ham turns red. He repeats the process on the fresh side
where the clavicle blade sticks up through the meat. "That'll
keep the skippers out," he says, referring to the larval stage of
a fly, which can be the bane of a ham's existence. "They'll eat the
damn meat up."
Once the ham is thoroughly coated, Uncle Billy pokes a hole in
the thick end with an ice pick, makes a loop of rustproof copper
wire, and hangs it in the smokehouse, hock down.
The smokehouse sits next to the salt house, a square, white
clapboard building of pine siding and cedar shingles, with a
pointed red roof that is as high as the walls are tall. Uncle Billy
opens the heavy latch on the door, and we step inside, enveloped by
the darkness and the sharp smell of smoke and aging meat. He flicks
on a bare light bulb, revealing a concrete floor with a sunken
circular fire pit in the middle and a table to one side. Above us,
hanging on hand-turned wooden pegs, a dozen hams are suspended.
Shafts of light beam down through cracks in the roof. Unlike the
salt house, which is built thick and tight, ventilation is key
here.
Three wooden tiers ring the smokehouse rafters. The top tier
is for new meat. Two-year-old hams hang on the second tier, and
three-year-old hams are on the bottom, so that my Aunt Mildred, who
stands about 5'3" in her stocking feet, can retrieve them easily
with the help of a long pole made just for that purpose. When the
new hams are ready for smoking, Uncle Billy takes the older hams
and stores them temporarily in the salt house. The new meat goes on
the bottom tier, about three feet overhead.
Good smoking weather, says Uncle Billy, is like good
duck-hunting weather "I want it to be miserable--damp and cold."
But the secret that distinguishes his cured hams from others is the
wood he uses for smoking. In the summer when he prunes his fruit
trees, Uncle Billy saves all the prunings down to the smallest
twig. He has peach and pear trees, but apple wood is favorite, and
he makes sure he has several armfuls. He cuts a few extra armloads
of young sassafras, which grows wild along a nearby fence row, and
stores it all in a dry place until March.
The day before he's ready to smoke, Uncle Billy goes into the
woods and fells a hickory sapling as big around as your thigh and
cuts it into one-foot lengths. The next day, at seven in the
morning, he starts a small fire in the fire pit, using newspaper
and the fruitwood kindling. (Any other starter would taint the
meat.) He stays with it all day, adding wood and adjusting the fire
until he goes to bed that night.
"Once I get the fire going, I get it hot as hell," he says. "I
wait till it burns down. Then I put the green wood on the fire.
That's when the smoke starts." The idea in smoking is not to cook
the meat but to let the smoke enhance its flavor. If the fat starts
to drip, then the fire is too hot. The smoke is the important
thing; that's why the smokehouse is well ventilated. The ham will
be blond when it comes in, with a clear white skin. Uncle Billy
smokes it until it turns a rich mahogany color. Then his part of
the process is over: The rest is up to the meat and time.
After a few months, the hams often grow a thin patina of mold
on the skin, which Uncle Billy says "suits them just fine. It's a
sign of good moisture and maturity. Aging has got more to do with
it than anything I do. Folks who make liquor will tell you the same
thing." Although he has eaten the milder, one-year-old hams his
children seem to prefer, for Uncle Billy a ham doesn't reach its
full potential until the third year. "Three-year-old meat gets
hard, red, and stringy," he says. It has a bite to it. It sure is
good eating."
Salt-cured and smoked, the new hams go to the top tier to age.
The only thing left to do is wait and check them periodically for
skippers. The best way to discourage the insects is to keep the
smokehouse clean and dark. Insects, Uncle Billy explains, are at-
tracted to light. So if you keep it dark you'll keep it safe.
Should the skippers get
in anyway, he'll put his hams in the freezer for a day and
scrub the smokehouse until"it's as clean as a hospital."
"The old generation had all these little things they did,"
Uncle Billy says. "Put them together and you never have to worry
about chemicals to keep the bugs out. Like room. If you've got
space and room, things seem to work better. The commercial boys
wouldn't think of building this big a space for a few hams. They
can control the humidity and the temperature. But when you get
right down to it, I'll put mine against theirs any time. The proof
of the pudding is in the eating, isn't it?"
Uncle Billy has never sold a ham, despite receiving many
offers to buy them. The few he has donated to his church's charity
auctions have sold for as much as $75. This year, however, only the
bottom tier is full of hams. When I ask him about it, he shrugs and
kicks the ground with his boot. "I'll be 65 in February, and I plan
to retire. None of these kids are interested in doing it, so these
will be the last of them."
A week later I was at Cousin Duna's wedding reception,
standing in line beside a table packed with food. A woman from up
north was in front of me. She picked up a ham biscuit and took a
delicate bite. "Oh, that's very salty," she said.
"Well," I offered, "it's a bit of an acquired taste."