Cider-Cured, Braised Ham
Welcome to ham month on the blog. Don't worry: it won't be ham all the time. But all month, I'm going to be featuring snippets from our new book: HAM: AN OBSESSION WITH THE HINDQUARTER. Up top on this page sits the ham for today: a cured, braised one. And there to the right on the page sits the book itself. It's already available on amazon--and will be published in just a few weeks.
I can't wait until you see it! It's the first time I've written a book in first-person. All our other books are written as "we." This one's "I." It's my fractured, at-times hilarious take on how Bruce developed those 100 recipes, plus the story of how we raised our own pig, took it to slaughter, tried to cure one leg, failed, tried again, and learned more about ham than you can imagine, including tres chic European hams and down-home American country hams.
To quote from the introduction:
From that first fateful day when we started this project [you'll have to read about it--let's just say it involves the lethal combo of Eudora Welty and porn], 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, black-bedecked New Yorkers eating a quivering pile of ham in aspic.
So let's get our first sneak-peak recipe from the book: the way to make your own wet-cured ham.
Mark Scarbrough | Posted on
Monday, February 1, 2010 at 1:43PM
big-ass,
braise,
cider,
first-person,
ham,
hindquarter,
obsession,
pig,
slaughter 

















