Ham

 My ham arrived.  It's been a long time coming.  Longer than you might think.

I've ordered three hams from Nancy, the ham lady.  The first, back in '05, was her classic ham.  It was completely delicious.  I ate it while visiting California, distributed a good deal to friends all over the Bay, and snuck some back into the Netherlands.

Coincidentally, on that same trip, we were given another ham (pictured here) as a wedding gift.  This latter ham languished in a friend's closet for a few months before it, too, made the trip to Amsterdam. There it served as the centerpiece of our housewarming party at Saxenburgerstraat.

Europe does not lack for fine ham, but an American country ham is a unique piece of flesh, and as best I can tell such a thing crosses the Atlantic only on very rare occasions. I resolved to smuggle in a second ham a year or so later, and took the opportunity to order Nancy's very finest flesh: a free-range porker she'd cured for a year or so in her swamp-situated smokehouse. To make a long story short they caught me at Schiphol, confiscated my ham, and--I shudder even as a I write--incinerated it.

This heartless treatment broke my smuggler's spirit, and for the rest of my stay in Amsterdam I forswore American meats.  It did not, however, in any way temper my lust for the Kentucky pig's salty flesh; the reader will not be surprised to learn therefore that one of my first acts upon returning was to email Nancy for the largest, ripest, free-rangingest ham in her house.  She was happy to hear from me--we have a very collegial relationship--and October being the season of slaughter (and thus, a year later, of harvest) it shipped right away.

[VEGAN WARNING:  GRAPHIC PHOTOS BELOW!]

I was happy to receive it.  Happy, and frustrated.  These hams are big, and mine was large even for its type, some 8 kilos of unassailable meat.  Unassailable, I say, because I only packed three knives for our new kitchen (the rest are on the boat), and of those three I broke the largest sawing into a wheel of Dutch goat cheese soon after arrival (it was worth it:  excellent cheese, lousy knife).  In short, I had nothing with which to work, and so the ham sat on top of my fridge like some unattainable pig-part god, showering its smoky blessings on our kitchen but not deigning to share of its flesh.

Then came Thanksgiving.  We had a small one this year, and lacking both a dishwasher and a hot tub at our house, we settled on Yaron's place instead (even though he and Erica were in Philadelphia for the celebrations).  In addition to the dishwasher and the hot tub, their place also boasts a full set of knives and even an electric one, a technology I'd never before tried.  I brought the ham along--it's a highly desirable addition to stuffing--and went at it with the electric knife, shown here.  The device proved up to the task of carving out a few pieces of the softer meat, though in the end I resorted to the traditional chef's knife.

Having broken into the ham it was necessary to butcher it further:  large as an American refrigerator is, the ham left whole would have taken up an undue portion of ours, and once opened it cannot be allowed simply to sit (though with its hide unpierced a properly cured ham can last months or years if hung in an optimal atmosphere).  No kitchen knife will cut through a pig's shank so I went searching for a saw.  No such luck, but necessity, spawning, as ever, invention, led me to the branch cutter shown at left.  This did the trick.  Not pretty, and the sound it made as it cleaved bone was off-putting to some, but boy, did it do the trick.

I'm home now, and the ham is too.  I keep most of it in the freezer with a bag of bits in the fridge for the occasional snack.  I eat it mostly uncooked--it's not exactly raw--and most often with the evening's borrel.  In fact, I'm going to go do that right now.  Thanks for reading.