A ham to make you drool

The Pig Diaries, cont.
A ham to make you drool

It’s been painful, the waiting. The number of times I’ve looked up at the muslin bags dangling over the front entrance of the farmhouse and wondered what’s happening to our hams has been too many to count. I’ve taken to using the backdoor to avoid the temptation. The front porch of Huntshill Farm is our equivalent of the traditional hilltop secaderos found in the borderlands close to Portugal near Salamanca in Spain or the drying houses of the famous Parma Hams from Emilia-Romagna in Italy.

Swaying gently in the Isle-of-Oxney breezes that usually float around our farm (although are known to occasionally blow their stacks and hit gale force speeds) our hams are really a research process. First we want to know whether we can produce British air-dried hams that can rival the Europeans – and especially the Spanish and Italians. So we’re trying different salting techniques and curing times. We’re trying to make the process 100% natural so our flavourings are limited to things like white pepper corns, coriander seeds and even rosemary from our own gardens. We are, of course, dependent on the British weather which obeys no natural order and cannot even be counted on to offer the months of rain and damp the place is famous for. (Remember, this is the voice of a man from the temperate climes of lovely New Zealand!) This past summer has been a stunner, day after day of sunshine, heat and humidity – not that the English are happy about it. They complain equally when it’s hot, cold, wet or dry.

So it was with some trepidation that I took down our oldest drying ham from under the porch and with Bill and his son Rupert standing by, removed it from the muslin bag. It smelled fabulous, like a fine Spanish Serano. It looked beautiful – a small blush of white dust on the skin side and dark, dried crust across the exposed meat. To all intents and purposes it imitated every visual and olfactory quality of the European gods of ham.

Bill brought out two knives, a long, slender ham carving knife and an ancient, dull-looking wooden handled steel knife that I’ve noticed is his constant companion most Sunday afternoons when a roast is about to appear. We cut fat from around the base of the mandolin-shaped ham. Then Bill proceeded to shave paper-thin slices of the ham from the base. It looked inviting, almost translucent in its thinness with a pure white border of fat.

We each took a slice and tasted.

“A bit salty,” then … silence. We tasted slowly, intently, taking the moment very seriously.
“Bloody hell, this is really good –  it’s sweet, salty, delicate, and has that melting quality of hams aged a year or more.”

It was a marvellous moment. Bill immediately claimed that this is what we should have been doing all along. My forays into saucisson and chorizo were just too risky with too many processes to go wrong. Aged, dry-cured Moons Green ham is where we should be concentrating. We kept tasting and after three of the now ephemerally-flavoured slices it was clear that a beer was not just desirable but a compulsory requirement for accompanying a such joyous product of our rare breed pigs.

The only real challenge will be the waiting. A minimum of six months. And then of course there’s the rather limited space under the porch. But we’re going to do it. Slowly but surely  and with Philip’s obsessive requirement that we do it completely naturally with no interference from science or technology or chemistry. On this there will never be compromise.

I can’t wait to be able to tell you that we are now selling our ham and that you can buy it right here, on the internet. Hang in there!