Maryland · Main
Southern Maryland Stuffed Ham
- Advanced
- 5 h
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
Leads with richness that coats and comforts.
Ingredients
- 1 corned ham, about 5kg, bone in
- 2kg kale and cabbage, chopped fine
- 2 onions, chopped fine
- 1 bunch watercress or mustard greens
- 2 tbsp crushed red pepper
- 2 tbsp celery seed
- 1 tbsp black pepper
- 1 tbsp salt
- Cheesecloth and kitchen string
The skills inside
The bare simmer: holding liquid below the boilBlanching & shockingStraining & passing through a sieveKeeping the cooking liquid
The words inside
Allergen screen
Found: celery · mustard
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Blanch the greens and onions briefly, drain very well, and mix with all the seasonings: the stuffing should be aggressively spicy.
- Cut deep pockets into the ham every few centimeters and pack them tight with the greens mixture. Rub any remainder over the surface.
- Wrap the ham firmly in cheesecloth and tie it well.
- Simmer in a large pot of water at a bare tremble for 4 hours, about 20 min per 500g. 240 min
- Cool completely in the poaching liquid, then chill overnight. Slice cold, thin, showing the green swirl.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Keeping the cooking liquid 60 recipes
- It was actually kept: the liquid went into a container rather than down the drain, and the volume saved is enough to be worth using.
- It is clean: strained of solids and grit, and not clouded with the debris of whatever broke up in it.
- It tastes of what it cooked and tastes concentrated rather than washed out, and it is not so salty or so bitter that the only honest use is the bin.
- It was cooled quickly and stored cold, not left standing warm on the stove to be dealt with later.
- Used, it does the job the dish gives it (carrying flavour into a sauce, loosening the dish, or setting when chilled) rather than merely adding water back.
Where it goes wrong The pot was left to cool slowly on the stove and only strained the next day, so it soured overnight: what should have been the best ingredient in the dish goes in the bin, and the recipe gets water instead.
Blanching & shocking 76 recipes
- A large volume at a hard rolling boil, and enough of it that adding the food barely interrupts it; a pot that goes quiet has started stewing rather than blanching.
- Timed rather than watched, and short. This is an interruption in the cooking of something, not the cooking of it.
- The ice bath was made and standing beside the pot BEFORE anything went into the water, not started once the timer went off.
- It went straight into the ice water, fully submerged, and stayed until cold at the centre: a piece still warm inside is still cooking, and the arrest has not happened yet.
- Drained and dried afterwards rather than left sitting in water, so it does not carry that water into whatever it meets next.
Where it goes wrong The ice bath was not ready, so the food sat draining in a colander while its own residual heat carried on cooking it. By the time it cooled it was a stage past where it was pulled, and exact arrest is the entire reason for blanching rather than simply boiling.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Riesling or Grenache
- Also Right
- Cru Beaujolais
- From the Taps
- Farmhouse saison
- Zero-Proof
- Cloudy apple juice, chilled
Pork loves fruit and gentle sweetness: orchard-note whites and low-tannin reds flatter it where heavy oak flattens.
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