Ham recipes.

[studiot]

What are your (favourite) recipes for cooking ham ?

 

My family had used the following for generations and most folks we feed the result to seem to think offers significant improvement of the standard method.

 

Use smoked or plain ham to preference.
First prepare you ham by making small slits in opposite sides or ends with a very sharp knife.
Then insert a sliver of fresh garlic clove into each slit, as deeply as practicable.
Follow this up by inserting one or two cloves into each slit, tailend inwards. These are removed after cooking.
Place the treated ham in a pot deep enough to cover with cold water and place on stove.
Add a rounded desert spoon of soft brown sugar to the water.
Bring to the boil and simmer for 1 hour per kg.
Do not over cook.

Once cooked the ham can be removed to stand.
The ham water can be used to add extra flavour to vegetables such as cabbages, carrots and so on.
Most folks are pleasnatly suprised when they come across this last bit.

 

[exchemist]

1 hour ago, studiot said:

What are your (favourite) recipes for cooking ham ?

 

My family had used the following for generations and most folks we feed the result to seem to think offers significant improvement of the standard method.

 

Use smoked or plain ham to preference.
First prepare you ham by making small slits in opposite sides or ends with a very sharp knife.
Then insert a sliver of fresh garlic clove into each slit, as deeply as practicable.
Follow this up by inserting one or two cloves into each slit, tailend inwards. These are removed after cooking.
Place the treated ham in a pot deep enough to cover with cold water and place on stove.
Add a rounded desert spoon of soft brown sugar to the water.
Bring to the boil and simmer for 1 hour per kg.
Do not over cook.

Once cooked the ham can be removed to stand.
The ham water can be used to add extra flavour to vegetables such as cabbages, carrots and so on.
Most folks are pleasnatly suprised when they come across this last bit.

 

The use of ham stock in soups etc is fairly standard. This seems to be an extension of that principle.

My favourite ham recipe is a ham and parsley terrine, in which smoked ham is simmered with carrot, onion, leek, celery and parsley stalks, allowed to cool and cut and torn into small chunks. These are mixed with mustard, a chopped raw shallot, some vinegar and quite a lot of chopped parsley and put in a terrine dish. One then strains and seasons the stock in which the ham was cooked, adds gelatine and pours over the ham mixture. This is allowed to set. It can be cut into slices to serve but the tricky bit is getting enough gelatine so it does not fall to pieces, without it becoming too rubbery. Best cut when cold from the fridge, but should be allowed to come to room temp before eating so the flavour can develop.

The French call it jambon persillée. But my recipe comes from an Italian recipe book.

[sethoflagos]

One of my favourite childhood memories is that of pea and ham soup based on a 4lb ham shank slow-cooked in 1lb of marrowfat peas. 

I found a recipe at https://foodnetwork.co.uk/recipes/lancashire-pea-and-ham-soup which is very much how my mother and grandmothers used to make it.

Having said that, I roast a cheap ham shank we'd picked up at Tesco's a couple of weeks ago. The resulting ham and mustard sandwiches were gorgeous! 

[studiot]

1 hour ago, exchemist said:

The French call it jambon persillée. But my recipe comes from an Italian recipe book.

Elizabeth David ?

 

I believe they originally had a ham joint with the bone in.
Of course you can't get them in England today.

 

52 minutes ago, sethoflagos said:

One of my favourite childhood memories is that of pea and ham soup based on a 4lb ham shank slow-cooked in 1lb of marrowfat peas. 

I found a recipe at https://foodnetwork.co.uk/recipes/lancashire-pea-and-ham-soup which is very much how my mother and grandmothers used to make it.

Having said that, I roast a cheap ham shank we'd picked up at Tesco's a couple of weeks ago. The resulting ham and mustard sandwiches were gorgeous! 

 

One very useful tip concerns the roast.
Traditionally cleaning the roasting dish is a chore,

But we take the dish as is the following day, and use it to start off some lentils and vegetables, then some stock and finally a left over worst bits of the meat.
This either becomes a curry or plainer dish or even pea soup base.

The good bit is at the end because all the water added cleans the roasting dish almost as well as our retriever (when we had one) so washing it up is a treat.

Thanks and +1 to both for your input.

 

Edited November 23, 2023 by studiot

[sethoflagos]

26 minutes ago, studiot said:

Traditionally cleaning the roasting dish is a chore,

Where I come from, the leftover contents of the roasting dish become the spread on the next day's bread and drip sandwiches.  

[exchemist]

1 hour ago, studiot said:

Elizabeth David ?

 

I believe they originally had a ham joint with the bone in.
Of course you can't get them in England today.

 

 

One very useful tip concerns the roast.
Traditionally cleaning the roasting dish is a chore,

But we take the dish as is the following day, and use it to start off some lentils and vegetables, then some stock and finally a left over worst bits of the meat.
This either becomes a curry or plainer dish or even pea soup base.

The good bit is at the end because all the water added cleans the roasting dish almost as well as our retriever (when we had one) so washing it up is a treat.

Thanks and +1 to both for your input.

 

Eh? No, Elizabeth David wasn't Italian. It comes from a book called Polpo, named after a Venetian-style restaurant in London, which I got as a present some years ago.

But jambon persillée is something you see at the charcuterie counter in many French supermarkets. It's actually not as good as the Polpo version, but it's the same general idea. The recipe in fact calls for a shank, so you get some gelatine from the connective tissue, but I just use a supermarket bloc of smoked ham, which works fine. But it did take me several tries to titrate the ratio of gelatine to stock so that it sets to the right consistency.  

(If you have some stock and gelatine mixture left over, you can let it set in small glasses and serve it as a savoury jelly appetiser, to eat with a teaspoon. It's rather good actually. I've toyed with the idea of embedding a quail's egg in it, to make it more chi-chi, but I'm not quite cheffy enough to have got round to it. )

Edited November 23, 2023 by exchemist