Sky Full of Bacon

The first post here was about a Southern-themed party, and I recently had another one, experimenting with recipes from two more southern cookbooks, the 1950 Junior League cookbook Charleston Receipts and Edna Lewis and Scott Peacock’s The Gift of Southern Cooking. I’ll post about all the rest of the things that went into the meal soon, but I want to devote a post of its own to the centerpiece of the meal, a country ham.

If you’ve read Pig Perfect or any of the other pig porn books out there, you’ve read rapturous odes to true old country ham… along, inevitably, with laments of how the real thing gets harder to find, and the best known name in the biz, Smithfield, is in fact no longer making true country ham at all.  True country ham is like prosciutto or jamon iberico, an artisanal product in which ham ages in lots of salt until it’s dense, funky, almost offputtingly salty yet blessed with a profound complexity of flavors.  It takes forever and so, the story goes, it’s nearly commercially extinct.

Well, yes and no.  This being the internet age, even as it disappears from conventional markets, we may be entering a new golden age of country ham in which it’s no further away than the nearest FedEx truck.  It’s not at all difficult to find suppliers online, and I had one in hand within three days of deciding that country ham was going to be the main course.  I ordered mine from Father’s in Bremen, Kentucky:

$38 plus shipping that brought it to about $50, still a relative bargain compared to others going for at least $60 or $70. Does one want a cheap country ham? Well, no, but I found this on some site being touted as the best value out of the ones sampled, so it sounded good to me.

It certainly smelled good— smoky, funky, hammy. Three days of soaking followed, and then I trimmed, laboriously, the rind off, revealing the naked, prosciutto-like ham underneath:

I had found an intriguing recipe in Charleston Receipts: it called for making a sort of gingerbread shell for the ham, full of cinnamon, cloves, and brown sugar, with a little pickling juice from whatever fruit you have handy thrown in. I rolled this thick dough out (another laborious process):

There’s something vaguely Flintstonian about the way that looks, like a drumstick of fried chickenosaurus. Five hours of baking, filling the house with Christmas cookie smells, and it looked like this:

It went off to the side while I prepared other things. Finally the time came to serve it, so I cracked the shell and started carving into it:

Actually, that’s Art, of my foraging video and The Pleasant House, carving as I raced to get the greens dished up and the biscuits baked:

Charleston Receipts actually assumes you’ll glaze and finish it some other way, but that really wasn’t necessary except for appearance, if you wanted a perfect looking ham. As far as flavor went— it was great, the salty smoky meat being counterpointed by the sweetness that the crust imparted. Some parts were tough, prosciutto-funky, others tender and juicy, the ring of fat was like bacon on some pieces, it was a wonderful meat that revealed different sides of its flavor seemingly with every bite. I think the crust roasting method, as hard work as it was compared to simply baking it with a lot of gooey topping, really did a lot to preserve the ham’s own flavor and juices and impart spice notes that enhanced it.

I made biscuits and had a variety of things to put on it— homemade fig preserves and apple chutney from The Gift of Southern Cooking, as well as Stonewall Kitchen’s Country Ketchup (which is really good, very tangy and more like a relish than ketchup) and other stuff. But pretty much anything you did with this ham, including cut some off the next morning and pop it straight in your mouth, was plenty good. I’m glad I added country ham to my repertoire. Even if it’s not something I’ll make often— as Lincoln said, “There is nothing more like eternity than a train ride of eleven days, unless it’s two people and a ham”— I can easily see making it once a year, setting aside some of the harder chunks for future use in soup, and picking it down to the bone over a couple of weeks each time.

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I have a little bit of a qualm about the idea of upscale Southern, I think there was upscale Southern dining which is largely extinct and there is downscale Southern which is wildly popular in many forms and then there is an attempt to take the latter and serve it like the former. This is a bad thing if it just means charging more for a tamed version, like upscale barbecue or Cajun, but a good thing if it means taking the produce and flavors of the region and treating them with the respect we now pay other regions— using them freshly and seasonally and with respect for time-tested traditions. On the whole Big Jones, a “coastal Southern” restaurant in Andersonville, seems to be oriented to that better sense of upscale Southern dining, and with at least the start of some sophistication in that direction. The menu is still somewhat short and limited to pretty familiar things— gumbo, pulled pork, steak (!)— but maybe, over time, it will dig deeper into Southern traditions and become a Chicago equivalent of some of the innovative new Southern restaurants.

Very traditional start (because it started the same way as my recent Southern party!)— pimento cheese spread on a cheese biscuit.

This was the best dish of the night– a really tasty wilted salad with tasso ham, and pickled yellow beans. Fresh, tart, full of flavor, this is the sort of dish I imagined I would have (and didn’t, really) when I went to Vie some months back.

I doubt this pulled pork ever saw anything resembling a smoker, but very good when you combined it with the rather vaguely-named “Carolina sauce,” a green dressing that might have been Green Goddess, or perhaps something with mirliton, which appears multiple times elsewhere on the menu). The slaw that came with it was missing some oomph, though, needed mustard or vinegar or something:

I was a little surprised that a Southern menu offered little that would have flown with the younger son, and the presence of a stereotypical kids’ menu (chicken tenders!) was not the help to this parent that was intended. At least the mac and cheese was freshly and impressively made.

Fried chicken salad, untried by me.

A nice, authentic if not exactly world-changing gumbo, plated artfully with a pyramid of rice topped by an okrapus.

The bill was a very reasonable $60ish (the mac and cheese was comped, not for any fault that we saw, possibly for the fact that they saw me taking pictures….)

Big Jones
5347 N. Clark
Chicago, IL 60640
(773) 275-5725

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