“You’ll need to begin preparing the ham two days before you will get a bite of it.”

One of the most delicious meals you can serve in many areas of the South is a country ham.  Salt or sugar cured, hickory smoked or not, Smithfield or Kentucky, peanut fed or otherwise, there ain’t nuthin’ like a country ham.  It comes in a cloth bag and is wrapped in paper, not in a can or wrapped in plastic.  It’s big, solid and heavy, like a short baseball bat (or a small bellhousing).  It smells musty and smokey.  And it takes some planning to prepare and serve.

We New Englanders grew up eating canned ham and not liking it all that much.  But one year, according to legend, our grandmother (yankee through and through) once received a very special gift: a country ham from Smithfield Virginia.  Finding no cooking directions on the bag, she glazed it, baked it in her oven, and served it.  Finding it inedible, she threw it out, saying she could not understand why Virginia hams had such a reputation.  “Not fit for a dog,” claimed she.

Our grandmother had no clue about Camille Glen’s (Heritage of Southern Cooking) admonition that ”you’ll need to begin preparing the ham two days before you will get a bite of it.”  Day 1: scrub the ham, soak it in water for 12 to 24 hours (possible to use a cooler for this operation). I have heard the fable of soaking your ham in tea instead of water, but I’ve never tried it. My guess is that tea is a “fancy” way of doing it that most people just plain skip (why would you want to flavor your ham with tea?); more fundamental is whether or not to soak and if so for how long (some folks who sugar cure hams say don’t soak at all) Day 2: put the ham in a large roaster, cover completely with water, bake 2 hours; turn, bake another 2 hours; leave in the water overnight (some say boil in a big ole’ pot).  Day 3: remove ham skin and fat (an entertaining process); baste (I baste with brown sugar, maybe with some corn starch, a typical ham baste), bake 20 to 30 minutes; allow to rest for 1 hour, then slice exquisitely thin. Serve with pickled watermelon rind, baked yams and other delicious stuff.

For several years I painstakingly prepared Virginia country ham for my germanic midwesterner inlaws at Easter.  Finally growing tired of the incessant criticism about it being too salty, not moist enough, took too long to cook, made a mess, etc. (note: these are the same folks who claim stone ground grits taste like warm wallpaper paste), I stopped bringing the extraordinary hickory smoked Smithfield ham.  “Where’s the ham?” they asked.  “I left it at home,” I replied. ”You all said it was too salty.”  “Didn’t mean we didn’t like it,” they replied.

A week or two ago, I posted a link to Gourmet magazine’s website that listed 60+ years worth of cookie recipes, which is really, really great, unless your intent is to make stuff to send to far off relatives. Almost all the cookies on their list rely on you making and eating the cookies within a couple of days. I’m planning on sending stuff off to my relatives who live 500+ miles away, so I thought I’d do a little research and come up with recipes that I can make that’ll keep fresh for longer than a couple of days. Here’s some that I came up with.

Micheal Chiarello demonstrated an unusual fried cookie that’s later drenched in honey, called Turdilli. On the show I watched, he said that these cookies would keep a month, but the website says they’ll only keep a week.

Cranberry Biscotti
These will keep a month in a sealed container. Makes 48 cookies

1½ cups all-purpose flour
½ cup whole wheat flour
2/3 cup sugar
1½ teaspoons baking powder
1¼ teaspoons cinnamon
¼ teaspoon ground nutmeg
1/8 teaspoon ground ginger
2 eggs (or 2/3 c. fat free egg substitute)
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
¾ cup fresh cranberries, chopped
1/3 cup sliced almonds

Preheat the oven to 350º f (175º c). Line a baking sheet with parchment. Sift the dry ingredients together (first 7 items) into a mixing bowl. Add the egg and vanilla, and beat until moistened. Reduce the mixing speed, and add the cranberries and half of the almonds, and beat into a light dough, about 2 minutes. Lightly flour your work surface. Divide the dough in half, and roll each into a log. Transfer to your baking sheet, putting them at least 3 inches apart. Pat the logs until they’re 1½ inches wide. Stud each log with the remaining almond slices. Bake until slightly firm to the touch, about 30 minutes. Let them cool on a baking rack for another 10.

While they’re cooling, reduce the oven temperature to 300° f (95° c). With a serrated knife, slice each log into ½ inch slices. Spread the slices back onto your baking sheet, and bake for another 30 minutes, until the cookies are dry. Cool 5 minutes, and remove to a rack to cool completely.

You’ve probably seen this phrase tossed about a lot lately, what with the holidays approaching. Your choices of what kind of turkey to put on the table seems to be widening, and the confusion mounts. Heritage turkeys are heirloom varieties, the ancestor breeds of the much more common but freak-of-nature, broad-breasted white turkey.

Heritage does not denote any specific breed of bird. In fact, you could conceivably buy the same breed of bird, marketed as “heritage” that are raised locally on pasture that you’d buy deep-frozen with the Butterball label on it. Standard breeds of turkey include Black, Bronze, Narragansett, White Holland, Slate, Bourbon Red, Beltsville Small White, and Royal Palm. The American Livestock Breeds Conservancy includes all of the standard breeds plus a few others under the definition of “heritage,” including Chocolate, Lavendar/Lilac, Jersey, Buff, and Midget White. The vast majority of birds available for the American consumer are the Hybrid Broad-breasted White, which are bred to meet the commercial turkey industry’s desire for birds with accelerated growth rates and unnatural proportions of white and dark meat.

In 1997, a census by the National Turkey Federation found that 301,000,000 turkeys were produced commercially but only 1,335 turkeys were heritage birds. Today, that number hovers around 10,000.

According to the Heritage Turkey Foundation, all turkeys that are sold as heritage birds must have bodies that allow them to mate naturally, are hardy enough to live their whole lives outdoors, and are allowed to grow at a natural rate. Strictly speaking, the birds marked as heritage are not necessarily free-range nor are they raised organically, but considering the small number of birds that can be classified as such, chances are good that these birds were raised in a healthier and more humane environment than your typical industrial turkey farm.

Be aware that because there are so few birds available on the market, it may already be too late to get one for your holiday table in 2008, and you need to get your orders in by early November. But the good news is, the more people who seek out and are willing to pay a little extra for these special birds, the more will come to market in the coming seasons.

(image courtesy Gourmet Magazine)

Gourmet Magazine offers up a great site detailing 60 years worth of recipes for cookies. The recipes are presented just as they appeared on the pages of the magazine, so the recipes for the cookies from the 40′s don’t presume you’ll be using modern conveniences like a food processor, so you may want to tinker a bit with them, unless you’re aiming for ultimate authenticity.

If you’re on my holiday list, you can look forward to getting to taste some of these this December.

Note: 1/18/2010, With the demise of Gourmet Magazine, or just the passage of time, it appears this link is now dead. Sorry about that.

So, as a follow up to this post, the short ribs were quite the success. I can tell you now that I was making an elaborate and unusual beef stew that Alton Brown described in a recent episode. The hardest part was reheating everything up at the family house in Connecticut. I was prepared to bring some of my tools, but I wasn’t going to bring up anything I wasn’t 100% ok about leaving behind if I forgot it, or for whatever reason. So that meant leaving my enameled french cast iron at home. I did bring the one cast iron dutch oven I had because I hardly ever use it here. And I ended up using a cast iron dutch oven that normally sits next to the fireplace, and was completely covered with dust. After washing it inside and out, the inside still had a whiff of the oil that was applied to its inside who knows how long ago. I couldn’t get rid of the slightly rancid odor, and unfortunately, half the stew ended up taking on a little of that flavor. All’s well that ends well, because everyone seemed to like the stew anyway. And, for dessert, I served the Ina Garten’s rice pudding.

As for the competition, it ended up not really coming off, since my oldest brother didn’t get a chance to prepare his meal, since we all raced home a day early due to a threat of snow. Still, everyone had a great time, and everyone enjoyed the meal I made.