Secrets of the Smoke House #1
There are many secrets in the smokehouse. The lore of crafting the perfect country ham is as obscure and esoteric as the smoked rafters of the smokehouse interior. O there were plain things: hams are smoked, but not cooked, by the fire. Old school ham smokers kept the joint in salt for four weeks before hanging it up. Then the specialists each had their own method: “ hang [it] up and smoke with green hickory, every other clear day for eight weeks, when they should be taken down and buried in hickory ashes, and suffered to remain so through the summer.” I understand the ash burial: insect depredation was a problem—skippers could turn a hanging ham to mush in a week. Ash burial stopped that. Others bagged hams in burlap or smeared them with a paste of hot and red pepper. A school of lower-salt ham-making in the 1840s arose with only a 25 day immersion with a continuous 12 to 15 exposure to smoke. In the coastal plain from Maryland to South Carolina, hickory was sometimes supplemented with tobacco stalks to provide a deeper richness to the meat, according to repeat winner of the Baltimore Fair, Thomas Duckett in 1849.
Wet pickling hams rather than rubbing and salting them emerged as an alternative school of preparation well before the Civil War. You prepared a slurry with molasses, saltpeter, rock salt, and water—[typical recipe for 100lbs of met—five pints of molasses, 8 lbs rock salt, 5 oz saltpeter, and three gallons of water], boil and skim it until everything is dissolved and amalgamated. You take it off the fire and let it cool to body temperature, then pour it over you hams arranged shank side down. You let it sit in the pick from 3 (hot weather) to 6 (cold weather) weeks. Take them out and then smoke them . . . or not, depending on your tastes.
“They should be hung at such a distance from the fire, as not to be heated. They should also be hung up with the shank end downward, as this will prevent the escape of their juices by dripping.” Augusta Chronicle February 6 1851.
In the hill country of NC, SC, GA, WV, Kentucky, and TN smokehouse savants would use red oak {Quercus rubra) if they could not find green hickory. The flavor was a tad sharper than hickory. But because the general practice in those was to re-pepper the hams after smoking (again an insect deterrent), the general flavor impact of the country ham was so forceful that one did not mind the red oak edge.
A good smoking imparted a chestnut hue to ham rather quickly. But some smokers who sold hams and wished to move produced, devised “short cuts” to expense, such as admixing corn cobs with the hickory. While the cobs did not taint the flavor (like pine logs did), they threw up a lot of carbon in their smoke leaving hams dirty. The other problem is that tendency to be liberal with the cheap cobs, dumping them on the fire and pushing the temperature above 120 degree f in the smokehouse—the threshold beyond which one cooks rather than smokes the meat. [If one is smoking summer sausage the temp threshold is much lower—don’t exceed 80 degrees f]
In the 1920s the resort to tying fully smoked hams in cloth sacks for storing and aging became widespread.
Of course there are many paths to the smokehouse. Occasionally you will encounter deep country practices. One pre-revolutionary practice recording in the 1880s in Pulaski TN was to “take four measures of salt and one of ashes burned of green hickory wood—mix the salt and ashes thoroughly. Rub the meat well with the mixture using the pig’s ear as a glove to save your hand.” The cuts were then packed in salt, left for 6 weeks and then extracted and washed off. “Smoke it well with billets of green hickory. . . . I say use hickory wood for all of this because it is a sweet wood. Our sugar tree is nearly as good [maple], but never use pine, oak, or walnut, or any other strong sented or sour wood. Pulaski Citizen Nov 11 1880.
If one were to read the old hunting magazine articles from the South, there were very few aromatics employed in the smoke house. There was hickory wood, and cedar, and pecan, and more hickory. But the truth of the matter is that many of the old heads who laid up shoulders, hams, side, and fish had their smoke secrets. In the Lowcountry, for instance, the smoke masters added green twigs of the Swamp Laurel or Bay Tree (Magnolia glauca). In New Bern, NC, the related Umbrella Tree was used similarly. If one weren’t using hot pepper as an inhibition for skippers, some smoked hams with roots of the Button snakeroot, which also had the side-effect of stimulating saliva flower when one bit into the skin of a ham. In Florida, the White Canella, or wild cinnamon was added to the smoke house fire. Some dried branches with intact leaves, others simply used wood. While Sassafras wood was somethings used as an aroma inflector, not enough of the fresh and agreeable scene of sassafras was imparted to make it a matter of perpetual resort. More often was persimmon wood added to a fire, if the wood were not being employed by carvers somewhere. The use of corn cobs to produce smoke is a 20th century curiosity.
The St. John’s Hunt in Berkley County, SC, was famous for adding Liatris odoratissima (deertongue, wild vanilla) into its casing mix. Its affinity for smoke was such that it was often used to smooth out tobacco in the South. Another local herb added to the St. John’s formula was Gnaphalium polycephalum, or sweet scented Life Everlasting. Thyme, Sage, and Rosemary were the commonest garden herbs. Pepper the commonest spice.