The Dakota Cheese Company was flying high in 1983. With 11.5 million in sales of mozzarella and provolone, the 12-year-old company was expected to continue growing. Dakota Cheese president James Dee credited his government contracts for his company’s success. That success was enabling expansion into private markets. Dee expected Dakota Cheese to score a big contract with “a major chain of pizza parlors” soon.
Five years later, success gave way to disgrace. Farmers stopped delivering milk. Dee was forced to sell off his company’s assets to Associated Milk Producers Inc. No self-respecting pizza parlor would be associated with Dakota Cheese. Not after they’d been accused of defrauding the government.
The 1988 indictment claimed that by using calcium caseinate as an ingredient in the cheese purchased for school lunch contracts, Dakota Cheese had misled the government and violated the FDA cheese regulations.
A lab near Philadelphia completed an analysis of the cheese. They declared the mozzarella to be “phony.”
The company was done for.
But the Philadelphia scientists were just getting started. The analysis had them inspired. Perhaps mozzarella cheese could be altered within the confines of FDA law. Perhaps it could be improved upon, made lower fat, without sacrificing taste and texture. The lab took on the name “The Mozarella Group.”
Among the recipes in 19th century cookbooks, you’ll often find advertisements for hats and gloves, ovens, groceries, jewelry, horse accessories and more. Between the ads and the recipes, you could get a sense of a gilded life in the city, full of consumer longing and delicious viands. What is easy to forget- especially with the recipes distracting you with rich gravies and dainty cakes- is that in 19th century life, death loomed large.
Stories of disease, food poisoning, criminal and accidental violence are splashed across the “local matters” in old newspapers. In the back pages of many old cookbooks you will find the dark shadow of “pure historic cooking” in the form of home remedies for cholera, broken bones, and even cancer. An untested recipe for cake could lead to disappointment and waste. An untested recipe for “cure for Dysentery” could lead to death.
Many scholars have been careful to point out that this familiarity with death did not lessen the grief and trauma that people experienced. A family plot in Greenmount cemetery filled with little granite lambs reflects a life of tragedy and human endurance.
A lot has changed since the New York Times ran an article on Southern Maryland Stuffed Ham in 1982. That article described stuffed ham as a curious, acquired taste. “Occasionally one hears of a newcomer – a visitor, even – whose sensitive palate quivers with delight at the first piquant bite,” wrote the article’s author, Mary Z. Gray. “For those who can take it, the dish is especially savored because it is available only in southern Maryland.”
Nowadays, we live in an age of commodification and a collectors’ mentality about foods to try. The nebulous concept of ‘authenticity’ offers an alluring selling point to many diners. The comments on the Times’ March 2018 article about stuffed ham generally fall into two categories: fond reminisces or “I gotta try this!”
I haven’t had stuffed ham since I finished the final frozen remains of last year’s attempt. I’m pretty sure I swore off the process of ever making stuffed ham again, but that damned Times article just made the temptation too much to bear.
Originally, I had intended to work on a variation of former City Paper food writer Henry Hong’s “Fake Ass Stuffed Ham.” Hong is one of the few brave souls who have attempted to adapt the process to something a little more practical. Hong’s recipe called for a Boston Butt which is brined overnight before being rolled up with the requisite stuffings.
With a week until Easter, I decided I’d brine the ham with pink curing salt for a week for a flavor more similar to the Manger Packing Corporation’s hams (which contain nitrite).
This necessitated that I buy the meat that very day. I ended up leaving several grocery stores and a butcher shop empty-handed before finally catching a ride to Giant. Giant happened to have fresh hams so I ended up dropping the whole Boston Butt thing and going with a ham. From there I abandoned any attempt to make this easy.
Kind of makes this entire post pointless, doesn’t it?
Some key differences from last time:
I cut off all that tough skin from the ham. None of my recipes specify to do that for some reason (perhaps it should be obvious?) but some of the recipes online do, and it was an improvement. I may throw the cut-away parts in some scrapple or something.
This ham brined for a week in my fridge. I’d like to try it again and give it a full month.
I blanched the greens and chopped them in a food processor instead of hand-chopping. Definitely the way to go! I also used the mini-chopper to process a lot of black and red pepper.
Last but not least…. I de-boned the ham. After watching some youtube videos I took a deep breath and gave it a try. Not the most elegant operation, but I was able to use much more stuffing.
I cut some slits outward from the “bone hole,” and then I cut some additional outer slits in the spaces between them. The whole time, I recalled this quote from Rob Kasper’s article on Stuffed Ham in the Baltimore Sun in 1988:
“Ham Bone advocates cook the ham with the bone still in it. They argue that the bone gives flavor and posture to a stuffed ham. Anti-bone forces contend that with the bone removed, the ham is easier to slice and ‘you can fill up the bone-hole with more stuffing.’”
Almost lyrical.
Stuffed Ham Recipes, Southern Heritage Cookbook Library
As I labored away at the incisions, I thought of the point of the blog itself… oftentimes I simply want to taste food that I wouldn’t otherwise. Hearth cooks like Michael Twitty perform their cooking processes as a way of channeling lost voices of the past. Is it possible to channel the living?
I do know that every time I make the ham I think of kindly Bertha Hunt and her connection with her mother… the rightful pride imbued in this labor-intensive tradition. My own mother taught me the basics of carpentry, and even as I acquire new skills I am building on what I learned from her.
While engaged in the act of cooking other peoples’ recipes, I often imagine the ways in which a more experienced person would handle the process. Perhaps a stuffed ham pro would maneuver the ham expertly, making swift cuts in all the right places. I think about this as I wrangle and struggle with this ridiculous big piece of meat.
Is stuffed ham in any danger of extinction? Perhaps not. But it could be in danger of homogenization, as the home-ham-makers wane, and customers seek out the most “authentic” of hams. In a fascinating article in the Guardian about the British obsession with sandwiches, author Sam Knight interviewed an employee of a large sandwich producer:
“Twenty thousand people a day used to make a ham and cheese sandwich,” said Patrick Crease, a product development manager. “Now this is their ham and cheese sandwich.” I don’t know whether he meant to, but he made this sound somehow profound and irreversible. “There are 20,000 variants that don’t exist anymore.”
I ended this year’s ham-making not by swearing it off but by swearing to make it again, with my excessive red pepper, whatever greens the farmer’s market has to offer, and unskilled hands. Next year I plan to drag some family in on the act.
Take enough water to cover your ham in its vessel and heat the water with a ton of salt & curing salt, plus maybe ½ cup of brown sugar, or white sugar + a little molasses, peppercorns if you want. Basically just search the internet and figure out how much salt you need to keep the ham safe. Maybe ask a butcher or something.
Also ask them if you should remove the tough skin before or after brining. When they tell you, email me please.
If you manage to brine the ham for a month then you should probably soak it in some fresh water before using… old recipes do this a lot. Since mine went for a week and then I cut off the outside I didn’t bother.
Clean up all your greens and roughly chop, then blanch them in salted water in batches, drying VERY well. Process the greens and celery in food processor until chopped.
Grind pepper and red peppers (I used about…. 12 hot pepper pods). Mix all seasonings with greens and green onions.
Cut slits to your preference. I’m officially on team “bone hole” personally. Like…. you could even boil the bone in the pot if you care about the flavor. Stuff the ham and place in a pillowcase or an old clean t-shirt, pat with all the remaining greens and tie it tight.
Boil for 15 minutes per pound (or until internal temp is over 160 degrees… let it go a little beyond that this isn’t some pork roast) then allow the ham to cool in the water before removing to slice and serve.
Recipe adapted from BGE Cookbook “Maryland Classics,” the Southern Heritage Cookbook Library’s “All Pork” and “Family Gatherings” & “300 Years of Black Cooking in St. Mary’s County”
“All that is necessary for the enjoyment of sausages at breakfast, is confidence.” – Baltimore Sun, 1847
Historically, sausage-making has been a winter thing, but the sage in my backyard was out of control so I figured I’d make a go of it.
With dozens of recipes at my disposal, choosing one seemed daunting until I compared them and determined that they are all pretty much the same. That’s because the basic seasonings for sausage have hardly changed since America was first colonized.
Only the wealthiest of colonists would be likely to possess a copy of “The English Huswife” by Gervase Markham, published in 1615. Nonetheless, in it they would find a recipe for “links” made of fat and lean pork stuffed into casings and smoked by the fireplace after the meat had been minced and seasoned with salt, pepper and “a good store of sage.”
The same sausage seasoning formula is used in Hannah Glasse’s 1747 English cookbook. Eliza Smith, who also wrote a popular book in England which was published in the colonies in 1742, used sage but included cloves, mace, and rosemary. The addition of cloves and mace is predictable for the era but eventually fell out of favor while sage remained.
Although sausage didn’t undergo a flavor revolution throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, it did experience a mechanical one. The meat grinder was invented in the 1800s.
1881 advertisement, “Sanitary and Heating Age”
Elizabeth Ellicott Lea’s sausage instructions implied that she had access to a “chopping machine” in the 1840s, but that it was still a lot of work to cut the meat to fit into the machine. Since she was managing a small farm, she was making massive quantities of sausage. Lea advised that since “pork season in the country is one of the busiest in the year; everything should be prepared before hand that you possibly can.” She made sure to bake pies, bread, and stewed apples, and to have all vegetables washed “so that every member of the family, that is able, may devote herself to the work of putting away the meat which is of so much importance for the coming year.”
Cookbook author Marion Harland wrote in 1872 that sausage from a mill “is better, and the grinding does not occupy one-tenth of the time that chopping does, to say nothing of the labor.”
Sausage was of worthy importance for families to invest in specific equipment, but some choppers were sold alternately as a “mince meat cutter.” Baltimore merchant F.B. Didier & Brother took out a newspaper ad in 1855 declaring: “Every private family should have one for cutting up sausage or pie meat and for hashing purposes generally, meats or vegetables.”
Since the machines were essentially selling themselves, publications of the late 1800s advised hardware store owners on brand loyalty and complementary products to up-sell customers on.
Hardware: Devoted to the American Hardware Trade, 1894
To think, when I bought the attachment for my mixer, it was a frivolous purchase. (There may be a way to break even if you eat a lot of sausage and buy cheap meat…)
Since my sausage was intended to be kept in a freezer, I didn’t worry too much about preservation. I was curious to taste the effect of the common additive of saltpeter but I never got my hands on any, so I used pink curing salt containing sodium nitrite. I may have went a little overboard with the sage.
The butcher at John Brown General and Butchery recommended the 70%/30% meat to fat ratio. That too has not remained unchanged in centuries of sausage-recipes.
The quality and texture of home-made sausage are better but the seasoning (if you follow this formula) is pretty similar to what you’d get in a grocery store. I originally set aside a portion to season with Mrs. B.C. Howard’s unusual inclusion of ginger. Since I didn’t find the taste disagreeable I eventually mixed it into the larger batch.
My freezer is filled with months worth of sausage and I can’t complain.
Run meat through grinder and blend well with herbs which have been finely ground. Cook a small amount to taste and adjust seasonings if desired. Roll into 1lb logs in waxed paper to store. Cook in sliced patties for sandwiches or crumbled for other dishes. Freeze up to 6 months.
In 1894, Mrs. Charles H. Gibson, like Miss. Mary Lloyd Tyson and Mrs. Benjamin Chew Howard before her, got in on the trend of releasing a cookbook to share and boast her renowned hostessing and housekeeping skills. Like those other books “Mrs. Charles H. Gibson’s Maryland and Virginia Cookbook” capitalized on the fame of Chesapeake cooking.
“In placing my book before the public I feel that I have a right to claim a like indulgence to those who, before me, have given to the world the benefit of their experience, and I feel confident that my “Cook Book,” being the result of an experience of twenty years, will meet with a just reward.“ – Preface, “Mrs. Charles H. Gibson’s Maryland and Virginia Cookbook”
Mrs. Charles H. Gibson was born Marietta Fauntleroy Powell in 1838 in Middleburg, Virginia. According to a profile in “The Midland Monthly,” she was educated in Richmond “where she was a great belle.” Describing her as a renowned housekeeper and hostess, the 1896 profile gushes that Mrs. Gibson had written “one of the best cook books extant.”
“The Midland Monthly,” 1896
Around 1858, Marietta married Richard Carmichael Hollyday and moved to his manor in Talbot County, an estate known as Ratcliffe. Hollyday had inherited the mansion from his father Henry, the second son of the senior Henry Hollyday, who had built the Georgian home around 1749 on a tract of land originally bequeathed to Robert Morris by Oliver or Richard Cromwell.
Ratcliffe Manor sits on the Tred Avon River not far from Easton. Although books about colonial architecture always mention that the house is not particularly large, they go on to fawn over its beauty. Swepson Earle wrote in “Maryland’s Colonial Eastern Shore”: “‘Ratcliffe Manor House’ is more distinguished in appearance than the majority of homes built at the same period. The rooms are capacious, the ceilings high, and the quaintly carved woodwork delights the connoisseur of the colonial.”
“Colonial Mansions of Maryland and Delaware” by John Martin Hammond (1914) describes “an air of comfort and good taste”, with a living room opening to a terraced garden. “To the left of the front door as you enter, is a little office, or study, wherein the master of the plantation in the old days interviewed his overseer and attended to the many small details of management of the place.”
We are fortunate to have a rare alternative view into life at Ratcliffe Manor care of William Green, who had been enslaved at a neighboring farm, escaped to freedom in 1840 and wrote a memoir in 1853. Green singled out Henry Hollyday as a representative of the brutal plantation conditions of the Eastern Shore at that time, with accounts of cruelty, overwork and neglect of the clothing and feeding of the people he enslaved at Ratcliffe.
As the second-born son, the young Henry Hollyday is said to have inherited the Ratcliffe estate due to the irresponsibility of his elder brother Thomas.
In the revocation of the original will, their father wrote “the conduct and deportment of my son Thomas… has been and still continues to be such as has given the greatest anxiety and grief.”
The estate passed from ‘the good son’ Henry on to his own son Richard, Marietta’s first husband.
When Richard passed away in 1885, Marietta Hollyday became the owner of Ratcliffe. It remained her home even after she married former U.S. Senator Charles Hopper Gibson in 1888; he moved there with her. Gibson died in 1900 and Marietta sold the home in 1905. She died in 1914. I can’t figure out where she was living at that time.
The recipe I made from her book is a classic example of 1800s recipe confusion. Break the macaroni? I’d like to see an example of what macaroni looked like in the 1890s that it had to be broken into pieces. The whole thing about straining the sauce was a little weird – maybe this would be to remove fibrous tomato pieces? I used canned tomatoes. No specific cheese was called for so I used Parmesan because that’s what I had. When making old recipes it is helpful to remember that the original cooks might not have had a lot of options themselves.
I’ll wrap up this post with an assurance from John Martin Hammond, dismissive of the harsh realities of Eastern Shore plantation life, and unfazed by the drama of the wayward son:
“Ratcliffe Manor has no ghosts and no stories of violent death or suicide. It speaks simply of gentility and good living.”
Reidsville Review, NC, 1892
Recipe:
macaroni
.5 Lb beef
1 minced onion
1 Pint tomatoes, peeled and sliced
1 piece butter
pepper, black
salt
grated cheese
Break the macaroni into inch lengths; stew twenty minutes, or till tender. Have the following sauce ready : Cut half a pound of beef into strips, and stew half an hour in cold water. Then add a minced onion and one pint tomatoes, peeled and sliced. Boil an hour and strain through a cullender after taking out the meat. The sauce should be well boiled down by this time. One pint is sufficient for a large dish of maca-
roni. Return the liquid to the saucepan; add a large piece of butter, pepper and salt, and stew till ready to dish the macaroni. Drain this well ; sprinkle lightly with salt and heap it in a dish. Pour the tomato sauce over it. Cover and let it stand in a warm place ten minutes before sending to table. Send grated cheese around with it.
Recipe from “Mrs. Charles H. Gibson’s Maryland and Virginia Cookbook”
