You Can Do Just About Anything With Stuffed Ham
By Andy Dent as told to Hannah Lyon - Edited by Tom Chen
Originally appearing in Slackwater, Volume 7
No one really knows where it came from, but there are a couple stories out there. One is that [enslaved people] created it, ‘cause they used to get the lesser cuts of meat. And to make it stretch, to make it taste better, they put in the vegetables—kale and cabbage, and stuff like that. But there’s also Europe, [where] they make corn beef and cabbage, which is very similar too. And the spices they use in it, the celery seed and the mustard seed, those are from Europe. The thing that makes it stand out is the crushed red pepper, which is from the Caribbean. It would [have] come up from the south the way the slaves came up. So it’s probably a combination of all of that put together.
There are many recipes. Any church that has a fundraiser, they always do a cookbook, and you’ll find a different recipe in each one of those cookbooks. I start off with the corn ham, which is the main ingredient, then we stuff it with cabbage, kale, onions. The further north you go, the more kale there is, and in the south of the county it’s mostly cabbage. But we’re right in the middle, so I use more cabbage than kale. But it’s pretty close—the ratio. I use three different kinds of pepper: ground black pepper, ground red pepper, and ground crushed pepper. And celery seed, mustard seed, and salt.
Nowadays, to cure ham it only takes a couple days. It used to take about a week or so, ‘cause you had to soak it [in brine]. Now they inject it with a brining solution. It takes maybe fifteen minutes to cut the vegetables up, another fifteen minutes to prepare the ham and stuff it, [and it] takes about four hours to cook it. When you cook ‘em you have to make sure they reach 165 degrees. It’s very important, that they are cooled the proper amount of time to get the temperature down so no bacteria will grow into it. It takes quite long to cool it off, so it’s pretty much an all-day process.
When I first started working here, [at W. J. Dent and Sons], about 1978, we made about two stuffed hams a year—around the holidays. Now we’re doing about ten to twelve a week. Holidays get really busy. We do over a hundred, maybe a hundred-fifty for each holiday—Christmas and Thanksgiving. Easter’s not quite as busy. We also do the county fair. We started making a stuffed ham pizza here, and that caught on pretty good. One night we were shooting darts, and everybody was hungry, and we just happened to have a bit of stuffed ham pizza. It was good! Our chef, L. J. Price, he came up with a Southern Maryland cordon bleu, which, instead of using just ham, he uses stuffed ham and chicken, and that’s a really big seller too. We also make sausage out of it—something I came up with. You take the ham and the stuffing, grind it up together and put it in a sausage casing and sell it that way, cook it up. We even have it on one of our hamburgers, [the] bacon bacon burger, with stuffed ham on it. We [also] do a calzone.
A lot of people use it for breakfast too, fry it up with their eggs, stuff like that. You can do just about anything with stuffed ham.
My recipe has changed a little bit over the years. I learned to stuff ham from John Schafer and Paul Morris, who are two of the butchers that worked here before me. Traditionally you’re supposed to use knife holes and just stuff the holes, but they taught me to take the bone out and cut big slits on the inside, so you can stuff it faster, so it takes less time to stuff.
Over the years people have brought hams in for me to slice up for them, and, you know, taste and see how their hams are. I’ve picked up a few things from other people’s hams and added it to my ham, so it has evolved over the years.
Back in the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century, there was a group of people that left St. Mary’s County and went to Kentucky. That’s the only other place you can find it. We know it was established before the eighteenth century, ‘cause if they took it with them, it had to have been around for a while. It goes back a long way; we just don’t know how far back it goes.
I think everyone should try making one, just for the experience. But it’s so much ham, and families aren’t that big anymore—it’d be a waste to stuff a whole ham for just a few people.
