A Pair of Hams

It's been a good fall for Matt and Ted Lee. When Pat Conroy blurbs your Southern cookbook with "I goddamn love this book," you are pretty much playing with house money.*  However, the careful reader has to wonder if they are not collectively a ham gollem. In yesterday's DI/DO, the Lees sing the praises of the wet cured, or city ham. However, thanks to the keen eyed cinetrix, I learned they're on the record in 02138 (think Hello! for Harvard grads, if Hello! were relentlessly self-congratulatory) as traveling around the US with a (dry cured) country ham in a stainless steel case. If this were a campaign ad, this is where you would see the obligatory shot of a weather vane, and a voice intoning

"The Lee Bros. advocate one kind of ham for the unwashed masses who read New York Times, and another for their fancy Ivy League cronies.** The Lee Bros. flipflop on hams, which is unhygenic. Can you trust Matt and Ted Lee to choose your family's ham?
-Paid for by Citizens for a Honey-baked America."

Fortunately, despite trans fat legislation, we do not have ham elections. Yet. The article, its author, and its context are all pretty interesting, however. The lede runs like this:

TO Southerners like us, the apotheosis of pork is country ham — the hind leg of a pig that has been immersed in rock salt, hung in a smokehouse, then aged for many months to prosciutto-like firmness. We have hallowed country ham in national magazines, clucked over the decline of its mostly artisanal production and driven close to a thousand miles for a particularly fine Kentucky specimen. We have spent more on these hams in some years than we have on health insurance. We’ve even given them as wedding gifts.

So our dirty little secret, the one that may cost us our invitation to the next Southern Foodways Symposium, is that we are not, in fact, pork purists: we’re suckers for a glazed baked ham, those brine-plumped, brown-sugar-encrusted pork bombs that anchor the buffet line in all 50 states at this time of year. Their rosy sheen, firm salt quotient, flaky texture, sweet edge and bacony, clove-scented flavor invariably bring us back to the table for thirds and fourths. There, we’ve said it: we love regular baked ham.

In essence, the Lee Bros. are advocating the status quo -- at least in its more artisanal varieties, the kind of ham which is the only one available outside of the Southeast, is pretty good. As such, the article reads a bit like an ode to the familiar along the lines of Utz potato chips? Not bad at all! However, even though the article makes a variety of wet-cured New York hams sound pretty appealing,  the reader is left wanting to try country ham. If these "brine-plumped, brown-sugar-encrusted pork bombs"  are this good,  who would not want to try the real deal? These lads from Charleston are a canny lot, traditionally.

*Some guy named Mario also digs it.

**Ted actually went to Amherst. Which is totally different.

Comments

[Eater]

I feel that this is a common sort of Times article: X is great, as any fule kno, but hey, have you tried Y? It lives in the shadow of X! In fact, didn't Dana Bowen do her own ham piece a few years back, in which prosciutti took the role of X and lovely country hams hadn't yet moved beyond Y status? I know she did but I don't feel like searching.

Really comparisons are odious, and so are wet-cured hams. But anything that brings attention to Kurowycki and Baczynsky and keeps them and their masterful sausageworks around for a few more years is a force for good.

[CAAF]

Ted was a pal of mine in college, as it happens. A great guy. Just got their cookbook yesterday and it's byootiful. Was thinking how excellently many of the recipes would go with some Rick's Pickles.

[Fesser]

CAAF -
There are rumors that our Xmas tree will be surrounded by a wall of Lee Bros. cookbooks. I am excited. Of course, Rick of Rick's Picks is a Yale man, so it might be asking a lot for him to collaborate with a Cantab.
Eater-
Indeed, the format you describe is familiar. What was interesting about this is that it appeared to invert the formula -- sort of like retreating from bourbon geekdom to declare that Beam was not bad.