Italians have their prosciutto, Spaniards their serrano. These are hams of character and substance, hams with history. So why are so many American hams just pasty hunks of flavorlessness? Many Southerners never succumbed to such folly, and thank goodness. While you can find a proper country ham in smokehouses across the South, Virginia has a true ham legacy, housed in the small city of Smithfield, just across the James River from Newport News.
Smithfield's ham history traces back at least to 1779. A 1926 state law permits only a ham cured within the town limits to be awarded the name.
Over the decades, the town’s many smokehouses — Gwaltney, Luter’s, and so on — have been filtered into a single company, Smithfield Foods, which is to hogs what General Motors is to cars. As the only remaining game in Smithfield town, it holds claim to what’s arguably the closest American equivalent of Europe's protected food appellations.
Gone are the days of local pigs foraging in nearby peanut fields, even though it was long claimed the nuts provided the hams with a distinctive earthy note. Though modernity has made the dry-curing process more uniform, nothing can speed the six months needed to shrink these hams down to size and focus their flavors to salty perfection.
The flavors evoke a time when pigs aspired to something more noble than being the other white meat. In his own ham paean, the New York Times’ R.W. Apple noted that Smithfield ham “bears about as much resemblance to your pink, watery, run-of-the-mill brine-cured ham as a horse chestnut does to a chestnut horse.”
So if you find a Italian or Spaniard on a ham rant, serve them up a slice of Smithfield on a biscuit, or fry some up with red-eye gravy. It’s time to take pride in Americans' own little slice of hog heaven.
Smithfield's ham history traces back at least to 1779. A 1926 state law permits only a ham cured within the town limits to be awarded the name.
Over the decades, the town’s many smokehouses — Gwaltney, Luter’s, and so on — have been filtered into a single company, Smithfield Foods, which is to hogs what General Motors is to cars. As the only remaining game in Smithfield town, it holds claim to what’s arguably the closest American equivalent of Europe's protected food appellations.
Gone are the days of local pigs foraging in nearby peanut fields, even though it was long claimed the nuts provided the hams with a distinctive earthy note. Though modernity has made the dry-curing process more uniform, nothing can speed the six months needed to shrink these hams down to size and focus their flavors to salty perfection.
The flavors evoke a time when pigs aspired to something more noble than being the other white meat. In his own ham paean, the New York Times’ R.W. Apple noted that Smithfield ham “bears about as much resemblance to your pink, watery, run-of-the-mill brine-cured ham as a horse chestnut does to a chestnut horse.”
So if you find a Italian or Spaniard on a ham rant, serve them up a slice of Smithfield on a biscuit, or fry some up with red-eye gravy. It’s time to take pride in Americans' own little slice of hog heaven.
