Disappearing art of the country ham

McClatchy Newspapers (MCT) - The slow-cured country ham is the opposite of fast food.

It is also one of North Carolina's oldest culinary traditions.

And it may be poised to make a bigtime comeback.

CHARLOTTE, N.C. _ Salty. Leathery. The skin dried so hard, it can take a band saw to cut through it. Before cooking, you have to heft it into a sink and scrub off the mold. This is not most people's definition of food. But in the Carolinas, it's a good description of one of our most important contributions to the American food story: Slow-cured country ham.

It once kept people in this part of the world alive through tough winters. It added flavor and protein to meager plates of grits and greens. It was so prized, colonists made scarce cash by shipping it to Europe for the gentry.

Today, slow-cured country ham is not much more than a lingering taste of Carolinas history. In supermarkets, you usually find mass-produced versions that use climate controls to hurry the process.

What's hard to find is the original kind, treated with nothing but salt and maybe sugar, and hung in a room with open windows, exposed to months of spring breezes and humid summer nights. The craft is a victim of strict regulation and modern tastes that prefer sweet to salty and convenience in all things.

But maybe the world is ready to come back to country ham. Slowly made foods are finding fans in chefs who love strong, unique flavors. At gourmet markets, people pay a premium for imported prosciutto. When Spain's most famous ham, Iberico de Bellota Paleta, finally was allowed into the U.S. last year, aficionados lined up to spend up to $125 a pound for paper-thin slices.

What do people pay for Carolina country ham, for all that history, all that flavor and all those months it takes to make it? Less than $3 a pound.

NOSTALGIC BUSINESS

Charlotte, N.C., used to have its own ham tradition. You can still find elderly cooks who remember when a ham curer in the mountains, W.G. Long, would drive hams down from Ashe County in the northwestern North Carolina mountains and sell them off the back of a truck. About 15 years ago, soon after I started writing about food, I drove a loyal customer of Long's up to Glendale Springs, N.C., to buy a ham from Long's son, Clayton.

Last year, I heard Clayton Long was finally getting out of the ham business and handing off his customers to a younger man, Byron Jordan, who runs a barbecue restaurant in West Jefferson, N.C., and slow-cures hams on the side as A.B. Vannoy Hams.

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So I called Jordan and asked how he makes a ham.

Only four ingredients go into them, he said, repeating his favorite slogan: "Brown sugar, salt, mountain air and time."

Ashe County, N.C., used to have four ham makers, including the Longs and Vannoy. Today, Vannoy is the only one left, and it may be the last open-air curing operation left in North Carolina. Jordan and his wife, Nancy, bought the ham house from A.B. Vannoy's daughter in 1994. They wanted a small business they could run along with their restaurant.

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But for Jordan, 55, there also was a little nostalgia. He remembers his father, a veterinarian in Lexington, N.C., coming back with hams after visiting clients in the country.

"Because of my history, being around it as a kid," he says. "Thinking it was a neat and unique business. I'm hoping it doesn't become a slide rule."

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I made Jordan a proposition: How about letting me follow a ham through the process?

He was willing. So I took it a step farther: How about letting me start with the pig?

He was slower to agree to that. His business is watched closely by inspectors and regulated strictly. Any change is a risk. But Jordan also knows there is another world out there, full of gourmets who would pay more than $2.59 a pound for ham. He doesn't know how to reach that world, but he wants to know more about it.

So he agreed. I'd find an old fashioned pig and Byron Jordan would make the ham. We'd both learn something.

But he ended the call with a caution: "You know, we lose about 30 percent of our hams every year."

"That's OK," I said. "I'm willing to take the chance."

START WITH A GOOD PIG

On an unusually warm December morning a year ago, I drove 35 miles northwest of Charlotte, to Grateful Growers Farm in Denver, N.C.

Along with the growing audience for slowly made artisan food, there's also an interest in the ingredients that go into that food. All around Charlotte, people are raising animals in small batches, using older breeds prized for their flavor and letting them live more naturally than they would on a factory farm.

Natalie Veres and Cassie Parsons of Grateful Growers have made it a specialty, focusing on humanely raised livestock, particularly an old English pig called a Tamworth, a red-haired breed with a genial personality.

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Veres, 42, is the farm's pig handler. A stocky blonde who favors dusty work boots and well-worn jeans, she likes to say she does the muscle work of farming "50 pounds at a time," hauling almost a half-ton of feed, a mix of corn, soy and grains, around to the pens every day. She's quiet and gentle, a slow talker who comes to life around her pigs.

"Hi, babies," she calls, her normally low voice ticking up an octave, as we walk to a pen full of 5-month-old shoats.

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She perches on a metal trash can, her favorite spot to watch while the pigs play and tussle like big puppies. They oink with a deep, guttural rumbling from down inside their noses.

The action around their feed bowls never stops. Pushing, nudging, sidling in. Every day is Thanksgiving for pigs, Veres says: Eat and sleep, eat and sleep.

When I step into the pen wearing black suede work shoes, one pig presses a flat, muddy snout against my foot to see if it is food. It isn't, so he nudges to get under my foot, just in case I'm standing on food.

He leaves a gray snout print and I start to brush it off, then stop. How many jobs involve getting this close to your food?

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Veres points out our pig, his brassy red hair shining in the sun. What's his name? He doesn't have one.

Veres never names the pigs. She names the sows, who stay on the farm. But raising pigs is how she lives and pays the mortgage. She has learned not to treat them like pets.

"I truly appreciate these animals and I don't take any pleasure out of the end of their lives. But giving them a good life, that's something I can do."

Part of that is ensuring them a peaceful end. Pigs that are stressed when they're slaughtered have tougher meat. If they're scared, their meat gets high in adrenaline and lower in glycol, the sugar in their muscles. And Veres doesn't want them to suffer.

So getting them to the slaughterhouse takes several days. First, she parks a trailer near the pen, so the pigs get used to the sight of it. Then she starts feeding them on the trailer, so they get used to being in it.

Finally, she feeds them in the trailer and closes the gate, letting them sleep there. When the trailer starts to move the next morning, they don't get as stirred up.

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At the slaughterhouse, the pigs are allowed to rest at least three hours and usually overnight.

Making that effort is part of what Veres calls being conscientious. "Being mindful of each system's role," she calls it. "Respect, sustainability. Food that feels as good as it tastes."

PREPARING HAM THE OLD WAY

In late January, our pig _ who had grown to well over 300 pounds _ made the 76-mile trip to Thomas Brothers' Meat Processing, in North Wilkesboro, N.C.

A couple of days later, we drove to the cinderblock building in the back of a neighborhood of small houses, a loose-skinned hound loping beside the car.

Inside, it was like a small country store, stocked with red-waxed hoop cheese and a country feast of pork products _ slabs of snowy fatback, smoked and peppered side meat, liver mush and liver pudding. Behind a glass door, I could see workers breaking down a side of beef.

Owner Ted Thomas' grandfather started the business in the 1930s and his father still works there with him. Thomas, 50, is 6-foot-2 with a bundle of braids tied at the back of his head. His business was up, because drought and higher corn prices had driven many farmers to thin their herds.

He knows Byron Jordan well, he says. There aren't many people left who cure hams the old way.

"It's the consumers and the weather," he says. Consumers are picky about ham _ "it's either too salty or not salty enough. And the weather _ hot one week, cold the next." Most farmers don't bother with curing hams from their pigs anymore. "They all grind them into sausage or slice them into chops."

Our ham _ the back leg of our pig, with the hoof removed and the hock, or cut-off bone, left on _ is 37 pounds, a lot bigger than the 25 pounds we were expecting. Thomas unwraps it so we can see: Pink meat under a 3-inch-thick layer of fat, with pale skin covering one side.

Thomas hefts it into the trunk and we drive 40 miles farther north on U.S. 421, past breath-taking views of deep mountain valleys and around breath-holding curves patchy with ice.

On a side street off West Jefferson's main road, across from a Dr Pepper plant, we find A.B. Vannoy's Ham House, a small, two-story brick building so close to the road, there is barely enough room for a car to pull up beside it.

It's winter outside, but it's almost as cold inside the concrete-lined front room. A wall thermometer reads 40 degrees.

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Temperature is everything in handling meat. This is why most hams are made in mountain areas: You need at least 30 days below freezing or the meat will rot.

"A lot of the way you control bacteria growth is temperature." That's Byron Jordan, who has come out of the curing room to meet us. He's tall and thin with graying hair and a soft voice. He looks a little harried _ this is one of his busiest days of the year. His small crew is being paid by the hour, he has to get 1,600 hams _ about 42,000 pounds of meat _ coated in curing mix, and he has to get back to his restaurant, Smoky Mountain Barbecue, for the lunch rush.

He's apologetic: In the ham business, you're very busy for about five days a year and there's nothing to do for the other 360.

In the meat locker, wooden pallets line three sides of the room and stretch down the middle, each covered with a plastic sheet and stacked three deep with hams trucked in from the Midwest. The crew has a metal bin on wheels filled with a mixture of brown sugar and salt.

Ham by ham, the workers pick up each hunk and ram it, hock down, into the mix. The movement is a curving swoosh, like spiking a football _ a 25-pound football made of fat, bone and meat.

Slamming the meat down is important. You have to force salt and sugar into the cut surface of the hock, where the curing mixture will work into the circulatory system and spread throughout the meat.

They scoop a little extra mix around each ham, then they heft it back into the pile, where it will sit for 35 to 39 days, while the salt works its way into the meat.

Federal regulations require that a country ham has to spend at least 30 days coated in the cure mix. Then it has to hang through the hottest months _ June, July and August _ while the heat activates the salt.

The idea behind curing meat is simple: Salt draws out moisture. Without moisture, bacteria can't survive. The trick is to remove enough moisture to keep the meat from spoiling while leaving enough to make the meat palatable. These days, since people want sweeter ham, they lower the salt and increase the sugar as much as possible, while still making the ham safe to eat. The most the law will allow is 6 parts salt to 1 part sugar.

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The crew works its way around the pallets and it's finally time for our ham. It stands out: Twelve pounds heavier than the rest, it's also cut wider. Jordan does a quick calculation: It will have to spend 57 days in the cure. And because it's different, from an old-breed pig, there's a higher chance it will spoil.

To be safe, a ham has to lose at least 18 percent of its water content, although most usually lose 25 to 27 percent.

I cross my fingers as Jordan picks it up, plunges it into the mixture, and places it alone on a pallet, separate from the others. It's 11:55 a.m. on Jan. 23.

The workers leave the room, pulling off their white smocks and lining up to get paid.

In the meat locker, it's cold and quiet. There is a soft caramel smell of dissolving sugar and a constant drizzling sound as juices head to the floor drains. Moisture is coming out. Salt is going in.

Jordan clicks off the fluorescent lights and slides the metal door closed. Our ham will wait in the dark.

___

© 2008, The Charlotte Observer (Charlotte, N.C.).