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Have Ham, Will Travel

by Elizabeth Angell
Winter 2007 , Page 46

winter07 passions lee1 A truly great country ham should be treated with care. The fine ones, the ones made according to traditional recipes, are cured in salt and brown sugar, carefully hand-washed, hung in a smokehouse, bathed in the thick smoke of a hickory-wood fire, then aged for months in a dark, quiet warehouse. Like prosciutto, country ham can last for years, even after you’ve cut through the thick layer of protective skin and exposed the salty, rich meat to the air.

Entrepreneur and cookbook author Matt Lee and his brother and writing partner, Ted Lee, had a ham like that. Aged for 17 months, it was one of the last hams cured by Col. Bill Newsom, a legendary artisanal pork producer based in Princeton, Ky., who died in 1999. “We use country ham in so many impromptu meals, and this one was really special,” says Ted. “It had to be savored.”

The brothers commute frequently between New York and Charleston, the home of Boiled Peanuts, their Southern-food Internet and mail-order business, and they decided they couldn’t leave their Newsom ham home. As they wrote in their recent book, The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook, “Sometimes you love a ham so much you want to take it with you and share it with people.”

They considered several transportation methods and settled on a vintage stainless steel Zero Manufacturing, Inc. briefcase—“the kind that people use to carry their lab equipment and rocket launchers,” says Matt. A friend had bought the case at a flea market and lovingly buffed and polished it. When he gave it to the Lees, no one was sure of its eventual purpose.

Then inspiration struck. “It comes with foam inserts, and you custom cut the foam to fit the ham, or the howitzer or whatever,” says Matt. The brothers carved out the interior padding to fit their ham, which traveled safely from LaGuardia to Charleston International Airport.

“Then we thought, why don’t we bring a ham whenever we go someplace?” says Matt. “We’re on the road all the time, and it’s just a great thing to have to build a meal around.”

Country ham can be baked and served with pickled peaches. It can be sliced thinly and placed inside a biscuit with a swipe of butter and a spoonful of Jerusalem-artichoke relish. Chunks can be simmered in buttermilk and olive oil and served over pasta, for a Southern take on spaghetti carbonara. Toward the end, when the ham is too dry to slice off neatly, it can be grated with a box grater over a bowl of butter-bean soup like densely flavored salt. As with their ham transport method, the Lee brothers stumbled on food writing accidentally. After graduating from college (Ted went to Amherst), they landed in New York in the mid-1990s. Homesick for the taste of boiled peanuts, a beloved South Carolina snack, they launched a slim, hand-stitched, brown paper catalogue that showcased their favorite finger food and other regional pantry staples. “The feeling of having cheated geography through food was exhilarating,” they write in the introduction to their book. Before long, customers from Brooklyn to Anchorage were ordering fig preserves, sorghum syrup, and stone-ground grits.

Today, the Lees travel extensively in search of items for their catalogue and material for their food and travel writing, and they cook with and for other people all the time. Nestled in its foam cocoon and encased in shiny metal, a country ham accompanies them much of the time. Well-protected, that Colonel Newsom ham lasted nearly four years. “It must have crossed state lines 30 times,” Ted says.

Says Matt, “Thank God it’s legal to carry a ham across state lines.”

Zero Manufacturing cases are available new at Zerocases.com. They also turn up frequently on eBay. The Lee Bros. Southern Cookbook is available at most bookstores and at www.boiledpeanuts.com. Colonel Newsom’s daughter still makes a few thousand nitrate-free, hickory-smoked country hams a year; they’re available at www.newsomscountryham.com.