Ham is a tradition in our family, a tradition we restarted this past year. Actually, I should say a tradition I restarted. Annie wasn’t too wild about it.
Back in Nashville where I grew up, we McLeods ate Tennessee country ham and biscuits for breakfast on Christmas morning, just one day each year. My dad, the doctor, said we were eating enough fat and salt to last a whole year. He may have been right.
So the salt-cured ham was a special treat reserved for the holidays—generally a gift from one of Dad’s patients who couldn’t pay his doctor bill. It came wrapped in heavy brown paper covered in grease stains. Unwrapped, the ham sported a healthy carpeting of green-blue mold.
My brothers and I stared wide-eyed at the green slime and little pig hairs still sticking out of the greasy pigskin.
“Yuk!” we said.
(The only ham we’d seen to that point came sliced in a plastic bag.)
Undeterred, my mother scraped the mold off the ham, soaked it in water in a gigantic lard tin for a couple of days to remove some of the saltiness, then simmered the ham in the tin on the stovetop starting late on Christmas Eve, letting it slow-cook all night long so we’d have a ham ready to slice on Christmas morning.
We loved it. Even my father, the doctor, loved it.
After Annie and I married, we spent Christmas with her family in Virginia every other year until we had kids of our own. Virginia ham and rolls were part of their Christmas dinner tradition. Annie’s mom never soaked her ham and baked it instead of simmering it in water. She liked her ham incredibly salty, and it was. To compensate, she sliced the ham paper-thin. A little bit went a long way on a homemade yeasty roll.
When Annie and I moved west, we lost touch with the Christmas ham tradition. I don’t know why. I guess we were trying too hard to be Pacific Northwest people. We ate smoked salmon on toast points instead of ham biscuits, until this past year when I happened to see a familiar-looking ham recipe in a magazine. The memories came streaming back. I decided to give it a try.
So I ordered a Virginia ham, not a Tennessee ham. Annie doesn’t like Tennessee country ham.
“It’s not right,” she says.
Our Virginia ham arrived three days before Christmas. I unwrapped it and scraped the mold off the ham with a stiff (previously unused) dog brush.
“Yuk!” Annie said.
I put the ham in a huge canning pot, covered it in cold water, and shoved the thing into the refrigerator after removing two shelves, two gallons of Eggnog, and a lot of other stuff Annie had prepared for other Christmas dishes.
“What the heck are you doing?” Annie asked.
“Making some room for the Christmas ham,” I said.
“Well, why don’t you make some room for it in the refrigerator out in the barn?”
“Too late,” I said. “No worries. I’ll put your stuff out there.”
“Oh, brother,” Annie said.
I changed the soaking water twice over the next 24 hours, then brewed a barrelful of black tea and soaked the ham in the tea for another 24 hours.
Annie thought I’d lost it.
“Why are you wasting all that tea?” she wanted to know.
“Part of the recipe,” I said.
On Christmas Eve I toted my pot out of the refrigerator, poured off the tea, emptied six bottles of beer into the pot, and filled it the rest of the way with cold water to cover the ham. I put it on our stovetop and let it simmer there all night, just like my mom used to do.
On Christmas morning I made a glaze out of blackstrap molasses, brown sugar, and mustard. I slathered the thick glaze all over the ham and put it in a hot oven long enough to set the glaze. By breakfast that ham was ready to slice. Annie made the dinner rolls my Aunt Wiese used to make, and we had a feast.
“Yum!” the family said.
“But next year that thing goes in the barn,” Annie said.
It’s a Christmas tradition reborn. Makes me proud.
