York ham: what it is, what to order, what to avoid

Overview

York ham is a leg of pork rubbed with dry salt rather than soaked in brine, left to cure, then hung to mature for weeks or months before anyone cooks it. The result is pale, firm and dense, with a mild, clean flavor and much less of the wet sweetness of ordinary sliced ham. It is eaten cooked, not raw: a York ham is boiled or baked first, and then served hot or, far more often, cold and carved. That single fact separates it from the air-dried hams of southern Europe it is sometimes compared with.

The honest thing to say about its link to the city is that it is a name more than an address. It did not begin inside the city: York was the market town through which the country hams of the county were sent south to London, and the city’s name became the trade name. The last butcher curing it within the walls closed in 2008, so what you find in York today is the style, made elsewhere in Yorkshire and beyond, as it is anywhere else in England. Nothing in law ties it to York either: there is no protected designation, so the words on a label guarantee nothing about where the pig lived or who cured it. Yorkshire did give the pig trade one lasting thing, the Large White, the breed known in much of the world simply as the Yorkshire.

The story you will hear is that the first York hams were smoked over oak sawdust left from building the Minster. It is a good story and there is no evidence behind it; it fits a cathedral that took two and a half centuries to finish rather well, which is part of why it survives. Treat it as folklore. Much of what is sold as York ham today is not smoked at all.

What to order

On a menu or a counter, the words that matter are about the cure and the cut, not the name.

• Dry-cured — the claim that makes it York ham rather than ham. If a menu or label says only “York ham” and nothing about curing, ask.
• Off the bone — carved from a whole cooked ham rather than sliced from a pressed block. At a butcher’s or deli counter, this is what to ask for, and ask for it thick: a good dry-cured ham is firm enough to slice like a joint, and shaving it thin wastes the texture that distinguishes it.
• Gammon — the same cured leg before it is cooked. In British usage gammon is what you buy raw and cook at home, ham is what arrives cooked. A pub menu offering “gammon steak” is serving a thick cured slice grilled or fried, usually with a fried egg or a ring of pineapple; it is a related dish, not a plate of York ham.

The ways it actually reaches a plate are plain ones. Ham, egg and chips is the pub version and does the meat no harm. A ham sandwich on good bread with English mustard is the everyday one, and in the finger sandwiches of an afternoon tea ham is a fixture. The ploughman’s lunch, a cold plate of cheese, bread, pickle and often ham, is where you can taste it with least interference. Hot boiled ham with parsley sauce is the older, homelier dish, now more likely in a kitchen than on a menu.

Mustard is the expected partner. Outside the hot pub dishes, the ham is usually served cold.

What to avoid

The danger is not bad ham. It is ordinary ham borrowing a better name.

A rectangle of identical, uniformly pink slices is not York ham, whatever the packet says. A cured leg has a shape, a seam of fat along one side and some variation in color from the edge to the center. Slices that fit a square of sandwich bread exactly came from a formed block of pieces pressed together.

Read the label for “with added water”, which British rules require when water has been added beyond a small margin. Dry curing draws water out; a ham that has gained it was brine-injected, which is the cure York ham defines itself against. A glossy, damp surface on the slice says the same thing without the label.

“York-style” and “honey roast York ham” on a pre-packed tray in a supermarket chiller usually mean an injected ham given the name and a glaze. A counter that keeps the whole ham on the bone in view and carves it to order is the opposite signal.

Outside Britain the name has drifted much further. In Spain and parts of Latin America, jamón York means ordinary cooked sandwich ham — the soft, wet, pink kind found in a toastie — and has nothing to do with a dry cure. Readers who know the word from there should expect a different, firmer, saltier thing here.

Practicalities

Dry-cured ham carved off the bone costs noticeably more than the pre-packed kind, because it loses weight in the cure rather than gaining it. A price close to the supermarket’s is a reason to check the label for water. Ham, egg and chips in a pub is a full main course, priced like one.

The peak of the year is Christmas, when a whole ham is the centerpiece alongside or instead of the bird, and cold ham with pickles is a common meal on Boxing Day. Butchers usually take orders for whole and half hams well ahead; anyone hoping to buy one in late December without having ordered may find only the pre-packed kind left.

If you buy a raw dry-cured ham to cook at home, know that it is salty enough to need soaking first, usually overnight, before it is boiled. A cooked ham travels better: it keeps for days wrapped and chilled, which makes a vacuum-packed piece from a counter a more practical thing to carry home than a whole leg.