Sometime today I'll put the last of the maple and oak that we cut in the spring of 2010 into the woodstove. It'll mark the end of a four-year effort to clean up the woods around our place following the brutal winter of 2010, which began with a vicious snowstorm a week before Christmas 2009 and finally ended in April, with some of the worst ice-and-snow damage that this place has seen in the more than 40 years we've been coming up to this Patrick County ridgeline. There were huge limbs down, entire trees aslant and tops broken out of maples and beech, as if some giant had stalked through in a bad mood and shredded the forest into a mess.
We hired a platoon of woodcutters with a cherry picker, a half dozen chain saws and a Diesel-power chipper shredder to make mulch from the limbs, cut the big stuff into firewood lengths and throw it into piles around the place. They worked for a solid week and threw everything into big piles, getting it all cleaned up in early June. Ten days later lightning struck our log home, burned it nearly to the foundation and scorched so many trees we had to take down another three dozen before the rebuilding could begin. So we've had a lot of firewood for years, burning it as fast as we reasonably could, losing some of it to rot and bugs when we couldn't get it all split, stacked and off the ground fast enough.
The longtime plan has been to cull the deadfalls for our firewood around this 66-acre family property so we wouldn't have to cut down the mature and maturing oaks and hickories and maples that adorn these hills. There's enough old locust to keep us warm for a long time, if we can keep enough sharp chains on the saws to cut the stuff to length. Cutting old locust is somewhat like cutting pig iron. You can get through it if you've got enough time and patience, but it will wear you out first.
But there's one more farm shed to build to shelter the tractor attachments -- bush hogs, sickle mowers, augur, box blade, scrape blade and so on that have accumulated back in the woods. So the other day I hired a woodcutter to drop 21 trees that I have had to back the tractor around, slide in between and crank the wheels over hard to get by just to drop off one attachment -- and then go through a new set of gyrations to load on another. I'm tired of building sheds, but tireder still of having to thread the sylvan needle just to drop a rotary cutter and pick up the snow blade. I need an open space and a functional shed that's easy to back into.
So this winter's project is not the new shelves for my writing nook, but instead the cutting up of red oak and white oak and hickory and beech (or is that birch? Dang if I can keep it straight) and locust and sassafras and maple into firewood billets, stacking the small limbs for the chipper and splitting the good stuff for the woodstove. If the weather would give me a week I could finish the job by Saturday, but in winter you don't get a week. You sometimes get a full day, but even when it's dry it's hard to get going early when the mercury says it's in the teens or twenties and your joints are lobbying for another cup of coffee by the fire.
I've got enough wood -- split from another project the last two summers -- split for this year and probably enough to get through next fall, so the stuff I'm splitting these days won't be needed until early 2015. That should allow enough time for proper seasoning, if I can get it all cut and split and stacked in a way so the near-constant winds up here can dry up the wood. Those winds are the reason we think about firewood morning, noon and night. Especially night, when there's a minus sign in front of the temperature reading and the blue northers are wailing away.
Sunday, January 19, 2014
Wednesday, January 8, 2014
A balmy 17-degree morning
Yikes! That was chilly! Our gizmos tell us the temperatures went down to -2 degrees here, with a wind chill factor of -19, but we were relatively warm compared to some of our neighbors who saw more extreme lows and worse wind chills. But these awful numbers lately just give folks something to brag about, ignoring the prime fact of life up here: When it gets below freezing -- or even just above freezing, and the wind is blowing even gently, and you are pushing the yon side of 67 years with a pair of worn-out knees and knobby hands missing bits of fingers left behind in the blades of planers, hedge trimmers and the early-pop-top beer cans that produced an edge the masters of Sheffield could admire -- it really doesn't matter how much lower it gets. When you're cold you're cold, and the rest is just the second paragraph.
So, for the record, we could hear it getting cold in the night Monday. The deck popped and creaked and the roof moaned and groaned and the woodstove chimney ticked and hummed as the big locust tree rounds jacked up the heat in a rosy inferno. At dawn the rhododendron's natural barometer looked scary; when the mercury gets down around 20 or so, the rhodo leaves curl and look like a waxy green cigar. But when it got into single digits they curled so tight they looked like long thin cigarettes. Or cigarillos, anyway.
You can tell a lot from a dog, and when Sadie, our aging French Brittany Spaniel, needed to go out to do her business, she kept looking around as if to say, "WTF?" At one point I thought she was prancing as she picked up her steps, then I realized she was trying to levitate all fours so she could do what dogs do outside without having to actually touch hard frozen miserable ground. She and I spent most of the time lying around in front of the fire, napping, stretching and yawning. As W.C. Fields observed, repeatedly, in the 1933 film A Fatal Glass of Beer, "And it ain't a fit night out for man nor beast!"
But today looks a lot better. As I write it's 17 degrees on the digital Is/Was, the sun is pouring in and they say the temp might shoot all the way up to 30 today. Good golly, I've got to dig out the flip-flops and Bermuda shorts and put on Jimmy Buffet. Have to watch out for those pop-tops, though.
So, for the record, we could hear it getting cold in the night Monday. The deck popped and creaked and the roof moaned and groaned and the woodstove chimney ticked and hummed as the big locust tree rounds jacked up the heat in a rosy inferno. At dawn the rhododendron's natural barometer looked scary; when the mercury gets down around 20 or so, the rhodo leaves curl and look like a waxy green cigar. But when it got into single digits they curled so tight they looked like long thin cigarettes. Or cigarillos, anyway.
You can tell a lot from a dog, and when Sadie, our aging French Brittany Spaniel, needed to go out to do her business, she kept looking around as if to say, "WTF?" At one point I thought she was prancing as she picked up her steps, then I realized she was trying to levitate all fours so she could do what dogs do outside without having to actually touch hard frozen miserable ground. She and I spent most of the time lying around in front of the fire, napping, stretching and yawning. As W.C. Fields observed, repeatedly, in the 1933 film A Fatal Glass of Beer, "And it ain't a fit night out for man nor beast!"
But today looks a lot better. As I write it's 17 degrees on the digital Is/Was, the sun is pouring in and they say the temp might shoot all the way up to 30 today. Good golly, I've got to dig out the flip-flops and Bermuda shorts and put on Jimmy Buffet. Have to watch out for those pop-tops, though.
Saturday, December 21, 2013
Lessons from Core Sound
Way Down East in North Carolina, the backyard boat builders in the watery neighborhoods just off Core Sound have for generations been fashioning works of art out of Atlantic White Cedar, old Chrysler engines and buckets of white paint . They made Core Sound workboats -- sturdy craft that could ply the often rough, sometimes shallow waters indigenous to Eastern Carolina, pulling out late Sunday and fishing all week and coming back in on Friday to unload, mend nets, take on ice and bait and get ready to head out again.
I was thinking about these fine old craft when I ran across a short piece on the America's Cup sailing races this fall out on the West Coast. As I've confessed many a time, I'm in love with boats. They have paupered me, driven me to the point of physical exhaustion and challenged me in bad storms, but I am drawn to them as surely as moths to the flame. Nothing prettier than a graceful sheerline -- that swooping curve of a handsome hull as it swoops back from bow to stern. Nothing more graceful than a sailing vessel on a brisk wind, reaching round the bend and up the bay. Nothing more peaceful than sleeping in the V-berth on the hook in a protected anchorage on a quiet night.
But these new America's Cup vessels are ugly descendants of the boatbuilders' arts -- carbon fiber spars and rickety-looking pontoon hulls that despite their ungainly looks can fly along at 40 miles an hour. I got hooked on sailing at about 8 miles an hour and on workboats that move along at maybe 10 or 12 knots on a following sea. Those speeds give you time to think about what you are doing and where you are going and, occasionally, even the chance to enjoy yourself. But 40 miles an hour in a mud-fence-ugly craft that can cost many millions of dollars and, according to one account, collapse in upon itself when the strain from a harsh sea overcomes the engineering feats of these fast sleds, raises a good question: what the hell?
So it is that I picked up up Lawrence S. (Larry) Earley's new book from UNC Press, "The Workboats of Core Sound," with a sense of relief. It is a loving look at the fishing boats and other craft that came from masters of the building arts way down yonder near the sea and just around the ditch from such places as Thorofare Bay and Cedar Island.
It still astonishes me what these builders can do with an old handsaw and some beat-up hammers and a few chisels handed down from grandfather to father to son -- and all without written plans. Many of these folks still build by what they call "rack-of-the-eye," maybe with a homemade measuring device called a "story stick" that is used to keep things in perspective as they put together a craft that will minimize the blowback from a cold spray in a nasty chop out on the sound.
Others have written about how they developed the Carolina Flare -- a severe curve in the bow planking that forces spray to the side and not to the stern where fishermen must work all day in a harsh environment.
Or the iconic Core Sound rounded stern, making it possible for weary fishermen to keep hauling heavy cord nets back into the boat when there are fish to pull in and no time to fool with such things as sharp corners and things that get in the way.
There's one other reason I'm grateful to Core Sound builders. For years, Core Sound fishermen built crab pots out of heavy gauge wire mesh. Some years ago they figured out other uses for the wire mesh, and started building and marketing the Core Sound Crabpot Christmas Tree -- foldable, up to 8 feet in height, with as many as 1,000 lights. We ordered a six-footer in October from our friends at Village Hardware in Oriental, just off the lower Neuse River, and got it lit up on the deck. Here's how that Core Sounder looks at about 3,100 feet elevation. And Merry Christmas!
I was thinking about these fine old craft when I ran across a short piece on the America's Cup sailing races this fall out on the West Coast. As I've confessed many a time, I'm in love with boats. They have paupered me, driven me to the point of physical exhaustion and challenged me in bad storms, but I am drawn to them as surely as moths to the flame. Nothing prettier than a graceful sheerline -- that swooping curve of a handsome hull as it swoops back from bow to stern. Nothing more graceful than a sailing vessel on a brisk wind, reaching round the bend and up the bay. Nothing more peaceful than sleeping in the V-berth on the hook in a protected anchorage on a quiet night.
But these new America's Cup vessels are ugly descendants of the boatbuilders' arts -- carbon fiber spars and rickety-looking pontoon hulls that despite their ungainly looks can fly along at 40 miles an hour. I got hooked on sailing at about 8 miles an hour and on workboats that move along at maybe 10 or 12 knots on a following sea. Those speeds give you time to think about what you are doing and where you are going and, occasionally, even the chance to enjoy yourself. But 40 miles an hour in a mud-fence-ugly craft that can cost many millions of dollars and, according to one account, collapse in upon itself when the strain from a harsh sea overcomes the engineering feats of these fast sleds, raises a good question: what the hell?
So it is that I picked up up Lawrence S. (Larry) Earley's new book from UNC Press, "The Workboats of Core Sound," with a sense of relief. It is a loving look at the fishing boats and other craft that came from masters of the building arts way down yonder near the sea and just around the ditch from such places as Thorofare Bay and Cedar Island.
It still astonishes me what these builders can do with an old handsaw and some beat-up hammers and a few chisels handed down from grandfather to father to son -- and all without written plans. Many of these folks still build by what they call "rack-of-the-eye," maybe with a homemade measuring device called a "story stick" that is used to keep things in perspective as they put together a craft that will minimize the blowback from a cold spray in a nasty chop out on the sound.
Others have written about how they developed the Carolina Flare -- a severe curve in the bow planking that forces spray to the side and not to the stern where fishermen must work all day in a harsh environment.
Or the iconic Core Sound rounded stern, making it possible for weary fishermen to keep hauling heavy cord nets back into the boat when there are fish to pull in and no time to fool with such things as sharp corners and things that get in the way.
There's one other reason I'm grateful to Core Sound builders. For years, Core Sound fishermen built crab pots out of heavy gauge wire mesh. Some years ago they figured out other uses for the wire mesh, and started building and marketing the Core Sound Crabpot Christmas Tree -- foldable, up to 8 feet in height, with as many as 1,000 lights. We ordered a six-footer in October from our friends at Village Hardware in Oriental, just off the lower Neuse River, and got it lit up on the deck. Here's how that Core Sounder looks at about 3,100 feet elevation. And Merry Christmas!
Thursday, December 5, 2013
A 55-year old woodworking project, almost done
It started out a long time ago in shop class at Charles Brantley Aycock Junior High School in Greensboro. The shop teacher was a wiry gent who drove a long, two-door Cadillac coupe, wore loud sportscoats, had wavy black hair slicked back with some kind of goo and what Jimmy Buffet would have called "a pencil-thin mustache, the Boston Blackie kind." He was a nice man overseeing a bunch of rambunctious 13- and 14-year-olds whose hormones were driving them up one wall and down the other. Girls in those days took Home Economics. Boys took Shop, Probably a good thing they weren't in the same room.
Part of the curriculum was to make something. Most of us made a lot of sawdust, sometimes sprinkled with a little blood after failing to heed warnings about sharp tools and goofing off. A few already had a talent for making a piece of furniture, and some never would have any conception of what it was all about. I was somewhere in between. My Dad has a bunch of hand tools, dating to the days during the Great Depression when he had worked in the car department of his second-cousin's elevator manufacturing business. He helped fashion oak, mahogany and maple elevator car interiors that went into office buildings, courthouses, banks, colleges and other places around the Piedmont.
I think my shop class would have been in 1958, maybe 1959. I remember buying the walnut planks from the school for a few bucks, running them through the big planer, jointing the edges, gluing them up with the heavy clamps and then pondering how to fashion the resulting 35-inch by 15-inch slab into a top for a coffee table in our family's den. I ran out of time and figured I'd finish it at home, then botched the job terribly by digging a deep divot with a rogue disk sander not intended for finish-sanding a table top, or anything else. It was more of a grinder, and it taught me a hard lesson: Ignorance is bad.
I gave up on woodworking for a while, got interested in basketball and cars and girls and forgot all about that slab of walnut. But my Dad, patient as ever, would haul it out every now and then and spend an hour hand-sanding the entire top while puffing through four or five bowls-full of Sir Walter Raleigh pipe tobacco. Funny thing: he always looked like he was enjoying it. He used boiled linseed oil to finish the top when it got relatively smooth, and found four coffee table legs of maple that he could stain walnut-colored and mount on iron brackets screwed to the underside of the slab. And for the next 34 years or so that coffee table reposed in my parents' den in Greensboro. It held Time magazines, Saturday Evening Posts, coffee cups, African violets, readers' feet, iced tea glasses, the afternoon Greensboro Record and morning Greensboro Daily News, a jar of Starlight Mints and all the other things that Americans plop down on a coffee table without another thought.
In 1994, after both my parents had died, I unscrewed the legs and put the now-battered and water-marked top up in the rafters of the workshop I had built in Raleigh. It came out of storage for a few years when our daughter Mary needed a table in Columbia, S.C., and came home again when she moved out west. It went back into storage, but I knew someday I'd find another use for it.
That day came not so long ago. We have been using as a coffee table a lovely old walnut dove-tailed chest, aglow with the patina that comes with 80 or 100 years of reasonably careful use. But it was so low that when we put crackers and cheese on the coffee table for guests, our French Brittany Spaniel, Sadie, would lay her head sideways on the table top and lick away to her heart's content. Cute, but not appetizing, at least for humans. We had to find a way to raise the elevation of that table -- and it occurred to me I could use the old slab if I could make a frame to sit atop the old chest and raise the cracker-and-cheese elevation.
But the slab needed several things. It needed to be flat. It needed to be square. It needed to be wider. And it needed to be totally resurfaced to remove one white 8-inch water ring, where an overfilled violet no doubt left its calling card, one black ring caused by who knows what, and one mysterious brownish smudge that had no particular shape other than blobish.
I knew the rings would never sand out -- not with any sanders we have. And while the top was 15 inches wide, my planer will accommodate only a plank about 12 inches wide. So the answer to remaking the top was to rip it lengthwise into two pieces, cut an additional plank for more width, plane each side, re-joint the edges and glue it all up. Then make a frame that would sit around the top of the old chest, with a little ledge just inside, so the new, larger, higher-than-dog-tongue top could be placed on the chest when needed, and removed when the larger top was not needed.
It took at lot of passes of about one-32nd of an inch to get each board flat again -- and doing so required nearly as much planing of the underside. So into my DeWalt planer disappeared this stamped inscription, no doubt imprinted on the back of one of the boards before it was delivered in the late 1950s from the lumberyard to the school: "Industrial Arts Department, Charles B. Aycock Junior High School, Greensboro N.C." I'm sorry that stamp had to go, but if the piece was to be uniformly the same thickness, out it had to go.
Now squared, planed, edged, glued, sanded and attached to a frame made from walnut I bought 36 years ago off a farm in Wake Forest, N.C., the new larger tabletop is about to get its second coat of spar varnish -- enough, I hope, to resist watermarks and tall enough to deter hungry dogs looking for a taste of whatever the grownups are having. So after 55 years or so, the old walnut slab is new again and back at work.
As Forrest Gump would have said, "Well, one less thing."
Or, as they say in Charlotte, "Viola!"
Part of the curriculum was to make something. Most of us made a lot of sawdust, sometimes sprinkled with a little blood after failing to heed warnings about sharp tools and goofing off. A few already had a talent for making a piece of furniture, and some never would have any conception of what it was all about. I was somewhere in between. My Dad has a bunch of hand tools, dating to the days during the Great Depression when he had worked in the car department of his second-cousin's elevator manufacturing business. He helped fashion oak, mahogany and maple elevator car interiors that went into office buildings, courthouses, banks, colleges and other places around the Piedmont.
I think my shop class would have been in 1958, maybe 1959. I remember buying the walnut planks from the school for a few bucks, running them through the big planer, jointing the edges, gluing them up with the heavy clamps and then pondering how to fashion the resulting 35-inch by 15-inch slab into a top for a coffee table in our family's den. I ran out of time and figured I'd finish it at home, then botched the job terribly by digging a deep divot with a rogue disk sander not intended for finish-sanding a table top, or anything else. It was more of a grinder, and it taught me a hard lesson: Ignorance is bad.
I gave up on woodworking for a while, got interested in basketball and cars and girls and forgot all about that slab of walnut. But my Dad, patient as ever, would haul it out every now and then and spend an hour hand-sanding the entire top while puffing through four or five bowls-full of Sir Walter Raleigh pipe tobacco. Funny thing: he always looked like he was enjoying it. He used boiled linseed oil to finish the top when it got relatively smooth, and found four coffee table legs of maple that he could stain walnut-colored and mount on iron brackets screwed to the underside of the slab. And for the next 34 years or so that coffee table reposed in my parents' den in Greensboro. It held Time magazines, Saturday Evening Posts, coffee cups, African violets, readers' feet, iced tea glasses, the afternoon Greensboro Record and morning Greensboro Daily News, a jar of Starlight Mints and all the other things that Americans plop down on a coffee table without another thought.
In 1994, after both my parents had died, I unscrewed the legs and put the now-battered and water-marked top up in the rafters of the workshop I had built in Raleigh. It came out of storage for a few years when our daughter Mary needed a table in Columbia, S.C., and came home again when she moved out west. It went back into storage, but I knew someday I'd find another use for it.
That day came not so long ago. We have been using as a coffee table a lovely old walnut dove-tailed chest, aglow with the patina that comes with 80 or 100 years of reasonably careful use. But it was so low that when we put crackers and cheese on the coffee table for guests, our French Brittany Spaniel, Sadie, would lay her head sideways on the table top and lick away to her heart's content. Cute, but not appetizing, at least for humans. We had to find a way to raise the elevation of that table -- and it occurred to me I could use the old slab if I could make a frame to sit atop the old chest and raise the cracker-and-cheese elevation.
 |
| The old chest, with top right at dog level |
 |
| The slab, about to be ripped apart from some serious body work |
I knew the rings would never sand out -- not with any sanders we have. And while the top was 15 inches wide, my planer will accommodate only a plank about 12 inches wide. So the answer to remaking the top was to rip it lengthwise into two pieces, cut an additional plank for more width, plane each side, re-joint the edges and glue it all up. Then make a frame that would sit around the top of the old chest, with a little ledge just inside, so the new, larger, higher-than-dog-tongue top could be placed on the chest when needed, and removed when the larger top was not needed.
It took at lot of passes of about one-32nd of an inch to get each board flat again -- and doing so required nearly as much planing of the underside. So into my DeWalt planer disappeared this stamped inscription, no doubt imprinted on the back of one of the boards before it was delivered in the late 1950s from the lumberyard to the school: "Industrial Arts Department, Charles B. Aycock Junior High School, Greensboro N.C." I'm sorry that stamp had to go, but if the piece was to be uniformly the same thickness, out it had to go.
Now squared, planed, edged, glued, sanded and attached to a frame made from walnut I bought 36 years ago off a farm in Wake Forest, N.C., the new larger tabletop is about to get its second coat of spar varnish -- enough, I hope, to resist watermarks and tall enough to deter hungry dogs looking for a taste of whatever the grownups are having. So after 55 years or so, the old walnut slab is new again and back at work.
 |
| The new removable top, sitting under a nice wet coat of varnish this morning |
As Forrest Gump would have said, "Well, one less thing."
Or, as they say in Charlotte, "Viola!"
Sunday, November 24, 2013
'You Can't Hurt Ham' -- especially with this recipe for the best ham you ever ate
In his 2012 album "Music to My Ears," Ricky Skaggs has a funny song about bluegrass music pioneer Bill Monroe's fondness for ham -- and what happened late one night on the bus between gigs. "Mon," as his friends called Monroe, was hungry as they raced through the evening but nothing was open at that late hour. A banjo player who had just joined the Blue Grass Boys tour volunteered that his momma had sent him off with a bag of country ham biscuits -- but the bag was getting a little greasy and the ham moldy and none of it looked like much. In Skaggs' and Gordon Kennedy's lyrics, the great bandleader and inventor of the high lonesome sound didn't care what it looked like: "Mon said 'Boy, hand me that bag/You know you can't hurt ham.'" At least one reviewer predicted "You Can't Hurt Ham" will become a bluegrass standard in due time.
I understand what Monroe meant about not hurting ham, but I also know this: You can fix ham, and you can fix pretty good ham. But if you want to fix a great ham, you need a sure-fire way to do it. And for that I've learned to go with the Wrap-Cook Ham method championed by my friend Barnie Day of Meadows of Dan, VA., which he first learned from Robert Crumpton Sr. of Person County, N.C. It's not only sure-fire and delicious; it's also easy.
I've written about this several times before -- first in The Charlotte Observer during my newspapering days not long before Christmas 2010. But then I realized that Christmas isn't the only time to do up a ham just right. There's Thanksgiving as well, plus any other time of the year, holiday or not. So I'm passing it along right now so that you have plenty of time to find you a ham and cook it up for the crowd.
Now, I could explain it in my own words, but Barnie's story is the read deal, and a good read to boot, so you can't miss. Herewith, the Hon. Barnie K. Day:
This is the world’s best way to cook a country ham. Guaranteed. Period. Scout’s honor. Cross my heart and hope to die. And it’s not original. Of course, I stole it. And, as luck would have it, it is also the easiest. Often the case. We overcomplicate a lot of things. Cooking a ham is one of them.
Let’s start with the ham itself, and how it was cured.
There are lots of run-of-the-mill brands, some of them old and famous but still run-of-the-mill, brands that owe their reputations more to glossy catalogues and clever and expensive marketing campaigns than they do to judge-by-eating juries.
Many of these hams are cured “inside out,” needle-embalmed with nitrate injections. They are not the best hams -- often more expensive -- but not the best.
Still, these hams eat okay -- unless you’ve eaten ham cured like your granddaddy cured it, ham cured the old way.
He cured his hams “outside in.” He didn’t know about nitrate injections. (And if he had, he wouldn’t have done it to his hams!) He simply packed his fresh in plain salt for six to eight weeks, took them up, washed and dried them, maybe smoked them a little, maybe not, probably peppered them, hung them in cotton sacking in a cool place, out of reach of the dogs, and aged them for several months.
A note here: don’t be flummoxed by the term “sugar cured.” Often salt is mixed with sugar, with pepper, with molasses, with honey -- all kinds of stuff -- and labeled some fancy “cure,” or another, but these things -- including smoke -- be it apple wood, hickory, whatever -- only flavor hams. What cures, or preserves, a ham is the salt that it absorbs during the curing process.
Buy whatever brand you want. For my money, the best country ham in this part of the world, the one closest to what your granddaddy cured, is a Clifty Farm ham, processed for 60 years or so by the Murphey Family, in Paris, Tennessee. They’re usually available, and reasonably priced, across Southside Virginia around Christmastime. ($1.79 a pound at the Piggly Wiggly in Danville.)
Okay, now let’s cook that bad boy!
Unwrap the ham and wash it. Yeah, they all have a little mold. No big deal. Really. It would cause me some concern if it didn’t have mold on it. Just palm it off with a little warm water. Two minutes, tops.
Put the ham in a pot that you have a top for. I always have to cut the hock off so it will fit the pot I use. They’ll cut the hock off for you at the grocery store. If I have to tell you what that hock is good for, stop reading this and move on. You got no business with a country ham. Either that, or you’re a Yankee, and threw the ham out when you saw the mold.
Fill the pot with water until the ham is covered with 3-4 inches, put the top on, and bring it to a boil.
Now here is the trick to this: As soon as it begins to boil, you take it off the stove. That’s right. Off the stove when it begins to boil. Set it somewhere where it will be out of your way.
Now we’re going to wrap that puppy up. Pot and all. You can use most anything -- towels, an old blanket, a quilt, a sleeping bag. The patio lounge cushion works well. That’s what I use. The idea is to insulate the pot so that it holds the heat.
I put an inch or so of newspaper under the pot, the same amount on top, wrap the patio cushion around it, and tie the cushion in place with baling twine. This doesn’t take five minutes. Just make sure it’s insulated good.
When you get it wrapped, leave it alone. Walk away from it. Forget about it for 12 hours. Just let it sit.
After 12 hours, remove the wrap, and take the ham out of the pot and put it on a baking pan. Careful here—even after sitting 12 hours, the water will be too hot for you to put your hands in.
Trim the skin off, score a diamond pattern on the thin layer of encasing fat, rub into it a cup of white sugar, put the ham -- uncovered -- in the oven and bake it for 2 hours at 275 degrees. And that’s it. You’re done. Let it cool before slicing.
Postscript: A year ago the former Party Doll Strickland and I were heading out West a few days before Christmas to spend the holidays in Boise, ID with our son John and his girlfriend Juta. You'd have a hard time finding a Clifty Farms ham in Idaho, but Slaughter's Grocery in Floyd, VA. often has a bunch of them, so we volunteered to fly the ham out West with us. We sacked it up in a knapsack and drove to Charlotte to catch our plane. The Transportation Security Administration folks ran that knapsack through their scanner and got real quiet and real studious for awhile, concentrating on what in the world was that thing on their TV screen. They drew a crowd of other TSA workers. Brows furrowed, fingers pointed and muffled conversations ensued -- until a TSA supervisor came scuttling over and said in a loud voice, "I know what it is, it's a ham somebody's taking with them. My momma gets one every year and takes it back to New York with her because they don't have anything like it up there."
We had a good laugh, and the Merriest of Christmases. I hope you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving and a memorable holiday season this year.
I understand what Monroe meant about not hurting ham, but I also know this: You can fix ham, and you can fix pretty good ham. But if you want to fix a great ham, you need a sure-fire way to do it. And for that I've learned to go with the Wrap-Cook Ham method championed by my friend Barnie Day of Meadows of Dan, VA., which he first learned from Robert Crumpton Sr. of Person County, N.C. It's not only sure-fire and delicious; it's also easy.
I've written about this several times before -- first in The Charlotte Observer during my newspapering days not long before Christmas 2010. But then I realized that Christmas isn't the only time to do up a ham just right. There's Thanksgiving as well, plus any other time of the year, holiday or not. So I'm passing it along right now so that you have plenty of time to find you a ham and cook it up for the crowd.
Now, I could explain it in my own words, but Barnie's story is the read deal, and a good read to boot, so you can't miss. Herewith, the Hon. Barnie K. Day:
This is the world’s best way to cook a country ham. Guaranteed. Period. Scout’s honor. Cross my heart and hope to die. And it’s not original. Of course, I stole it. And, as luck would have it, it is also the easiest. Often the case. We overcomplicate a lot of things. Cooking a ham is one of them.
Let’s start with the ham itself, and how it was cured.
There are lots of run-of-the-mill brands, some of them old and famous but still run-of-the-mill, brands that owe their reputations more to glossy catalogues and clever and expensive marketing campaigns than they do to judge-by-eating juries.
Many of these hams are cured “inside out,” needle-embalmed with nitrate injections. They are not the best hams -- often more expensive -- but not the best.
Still, these hams eat okay -- unless you’ve eaten ham cured like your granddaddy cured it, ham cured the old way.
He cured his hams “outside in.” He didn’t know about nitrate injections. (And if he had, he wouldn’t have done it to his hams!) He simply packed his fresh in plain salt for six to eight weeks, took them up, washed and dried them, maybe smoked them a little, maybe not, probably peppered them, hung them in cotton sacking in a cool place, out of reach of the dogs, and aged them for several months.
A note here: don’t be flummoxed by the term “sugar cured.” Often salt is mixed with sugar, with pepper, with molasses, with honey -- all kinds of stuff -- and labeled some fancy “cure,” or another, but these things -- including smoke -- be it apple wood, hickory, whatever -- only flavor hams. What cures, or preserves, a ham is the salt that it absorbs during the curing process.
Buy whatever brand you want. For my money, the best country ham in this part of the world, the one closest to what your granddaddy cured, is a Clifty Farm ham, processed for 60 years or so by the Murphey Family, in Paris, Tennessee. They’re usually available, and reasonably priced, across Southside Virginia around Christmastime. ($1.79 a pound at the Piggly Wiggly in Danville.)
Okay, now let’s cook that bad boy!
Unwrap the ham and wash it. Yeah, they all have a little mold. No big deal. Really. It would cause me some concern if it didn’t have mold on it. Just palm it off with a little warm water. Two minutes, tops.
Put the ham in a pot that you have a top for. I always have to cut the hock off so it will fit the pot I use. They’ll cut the hock off for you at the grocery store. If I have to tell you what that hock is good for, stop reading this and move on. You got no business with a country ham. Either that, or you’re a Yankee, and threw the ham out when you saw the mold.
Fill the pot with water until the ham is covered with 3-4 inches, put the top on, and bring it to a boil.
Now here is the trick to this: As soon as it begins to boil, you take it off the stove. That’s right. Off the stove when it begins to boil. Set it somewhere where it will be out of your way.
Now we’re going to wrap that puppy up. Pot and all. You can use most anything -- towels, an old blanket, a quilt, a sleeping bag. The patio lounge cushion works well. That’s what I use. The idea is to insulate the pot so that it holds the heat.
I put an inch or so of newspaper under the pot, the same amount on top, wrap the patio cushion around it, and tie the cushion in place with baling twine. This doesn’t take five minutes. Just make sure it’s insulated good.
When you get it wrapped, leave it alone. Walk away from it. Forget about it for 12 hours. Just let it sit.
After 12 hours, remove the wrap, and take the ham out of the pot and put it on a baking pan. Careful here—even after sitting 12 hours, the water will be too hot for you to put your hands in.
Trim the skin off, score a diamond pattern on the thin layer of encasing fat, rub into it a cup of white sugar, put the ham -- uncovered -- in the oven and bake it for 2 hours at 275 degrees. And that’s it. You’re done. Let it cool before slicing.
Postscript: A year ago the former Party Doll Strickland and I were heading out West a few days before Christmas to spend the holidays in Boise, ID with our son John and his girlfriend Juta. You'd have a hard time finding a Clifty Farms ham in Idaho, but Slaughter's Grocery in Floyd, VA. often has a bunch of them, so we volunteered to fly the ham out West with us. We sacked it up in a knapsack and drove to Charlotte to catch our plane. The Transportation Security Administration folks ran that knapsack through their scanner and got real quiet and real studious for awhile, concentrating on what in the world was that thing on their TV screen. They drew a crowd of other TSA workers. Brows furrowed, fingers pointed and muffled conversations ensued -- until a TSA supervisor came scuttling over and said in a loud voice, "I know what it is, it's a ham somebody's taking with them. My momma gets one every year and takes it back to New York with her because they don't have anything like it up there."
We had a good laugh, and the Merriest of Christmases. I hope you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving and a memorable holiday season this year.
Monday, November 18, 2013
Bringing the boys home
The uncle I never knew died 95 years and one month ago today, going over the top on the Hindenburg Line in a forgotten place in 1918, just a few weeks before the end of World War 1. If I read through the lines correctly on the military report, he practically vanished when hit by a shell early that morning. Still, there were some remains, and thus he was buried in a military cemetery somewhere in France.
My mother -- nearly 12 years old when her brother was killed -- told me how her father nearly lost everything he had while trying to bring his son back home to the family plot in Anderson, S.C. He made innumerable train trips to Washington to plead with the men who sent Victor St. Clair Minor overseas to at least do him the honor of returning him back home. Several years after the war, St. Clair and a few of his effects came home and he was buried in the little Baptist churchyard where our family tended their dead. I have a few of St. Clair's things -- one of his dog tags, a little bronze container that might have kept oil for his machine gun crew, and a couple of photographs.
I was thinking about St. Clair a week ago on Veteran's Day -- the date of Nov. 11 was chosen for Veterans Day because that's the date the War to End All Wars ended. While looking for something else I had come across my dog tags from my days in the Army in the late 1960s. And I thought about others of our clan who served under arms. Another uncle was a radioman in World War II, and St. Clair's older brother, Charlie, served in two campaigns as a cavalryman. The man for whom I was named, John Monie, served in the Confederacy and was taken prisoner. My great grandfather, the Rev. A.D. Betts, was a Civil War chaplain whose diary records how he held wounded and dying men of both sides in places like Gettysburg.
So far as I know St. Clair was the only one of our family whose return to the United States was delayed after World War I. We were lucky, because so many American families never found out what happened to their loved ones. Sailors went to the bottom of the sea, out of reach for eternity, and a great many soldiers and airmen were buried in unmarked and still unfound graves -- when there were any remains to bury.
I've been reading Rick Atkinson's "The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945," third in his Liberation Trilogy. Atkinson is a superb reporter and writer, and his book is a fine piece of work. On pages 638, 639 and 640 I found tears rolling down my cheeks as I read about the unprecedented effort to bring the boys home after WW II. There were 270,000 identifiable American dead whose families were asked if they wanted the remains of their sons and brothers sent home, or interred in Europe with their comrades. More than 60 percent came home, at an average cost to the government of $564.50 each, Atkinson wrote. More than 5,000 began their journey aboard the Joseph V. Connolly, the first of 21 "ghost ships" that would bring the GIs home. Thirty thousand Belgians, Atkinson went on, promised to look after the tens of thousands of Americans who would remain buried in Europe -- "'as if,' one man vowed, 'their tombs were our children's.'"
Bodies came off ships like the "Connolly" in New York and were loaded onto trains that would take them home. "Among those waiting was Henry A. Wright, a widower who lived on a farm in southwestern Missouri... One by one his dead sons arrived at the local train station." There was Sgt. Frank Wright, killed on Christmas Eve 1944; Private Harold Wright, who died in a German POW camp; and Private Elton Wright, who died in Germany just two weeks before the end of the war.
"Gray and stooped, the elder Wright watched as the caskets were carried into the rustic bedroom where each boy had been born," Atkinson wrote. Neighbors kept vigil overnight, carpeting the floor with roses, and in the morning they bore the brothers to Hilltop Cemetery for burial side by side by side beneath an iron sky.... Thus did the fallen return from Europe..."
My mother -- nearly 12 years old when her brother was killed -- told me how her father nearly lost everything he had while trying to bring his son back home to the family plot in Anderson, S.C. He made innumerable train trips to Washington to plead with the men who sent Victor St. Clair Minor overseas to at least do him the honor of returning him back home. Several years after the war, St. Clair and a few of his effects came home and he was buried in the little Baptist churchyard where our family tended their dead. I have a few of St. Clair's things -- one of his dog tags, a little bronze container that might have kept oil for his machine gun crew, and a couple of photographs.
I was thinking about St. Clair a week ago on Veteran's Day -- the date of Nov. 11 was chosen for Veterans Day because that's the date the War to End All Wars ended. While looking for something else I had come across my dog tags from my days in the Army in the late 1960s. And I thought about others of our clan who served under arms. Another uncle was a radioman in World War II, and St. Clair's older brother, Charlie, served in two campaigns as a cavalryman. The man for whom I was named, John Monie, served in the Confederacy and was taken prisoner. My great grandfather, the Rev. A.D. Betts, was a Civil War chaplain whose diary records how he held wounded and dying men of both sides in places like Gettysburg.
So far as I know St. Clair was the only one of our family whose return to the United States was delayed after World War I. We were lucky, because so many American families never found out what happened to their loved ones. Sailors went to the bottom of the sea, out of reach for eternity, and a great many soldiers and airmen were buried in unmarked and still unfound graves -- when there were any remains to bury.
I've been reading Rick Atkinson's "The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945," third in his Liberation Trilogy. Atkinson is a superb reporter and writer, and his book is a fine piece of work. On pages 638, 639 and 640 I found tears rolling down my cheeks as I read about the unprecedented effort to bring the boys home after WW II. There were 270,000 identifiable American dead whose families were asked if they wanted the remains of their sons and brothers sent home, or interred in Europe with their comrades. More than 60 percent came home, at an average cost to the government of $564.50 each, Atkinson wrote. More than 5,000 began their journey aboard the Joseph V. Connolly, the first of 21 "ghost ships" that would bring the GIs home. Thirty thousand Belgians, Atkinson went on, promised to look after the tens of thousands of Americans who would remain buried in Europe -- "'as if,' one man vowed, 'their tombs were our children's.'"
Bodies came off ships like the "Connolly" in New York and were loaded onto trains that would take them home. "Among those waiting was Henry A. Wright, a widower who lived on a farm in southwestern Missouri... One by one his dead sons arrived at the local train station." There was Sgt. Frank Wright, killed on Christmas Eve 1944; Private Harold Wright, who died in a German POW camp; and Private Elton Wright, who died in Germany just two weeks before the end of the war.
"Gray and stooped, the elder Wright watched as the caskets were carried into the rustic bedroom where each boy had been born," Atkinson wrote. Neighbors kept vigil overnight, carpeting the floor with roses, and in the morning they bore the brothers to Hilltop Cemetery for burial side by side by side beneath an iron sky.... Thus did the fallen return from Europe..."
Tuesday, November 12, 2013
'Wild Kingdom' up here
Since sometime in mid-summer we've known that things were a bit different this year on Belcher Mountain. We had some photographic evidence from our friends the McCraws, a family of hunters from Mt. Airy who have been coming up here for years to hunt deer during the seasons and to scout for wildlife during the off-season. They keep three deerstands up here, and use an automatic wildlife camera to see what's shaking.
Here's a picture of a critter they call "Mr. Grumpy," taken on Aug. 15 from a camera mounted on a tree a couple hundred feet west of my woodworking shop.
A few days ago Martha B. and our aging French Brittany Spaniel were walking across one of our fields and ran into one of the McCraws, sitting with his rifle by the old corncrib on a warm fall afternoon. She heard that "Mr. Grumpy" might in fact be a "Ms. Grumpy" -- one of four bears they have identified occupying the woods of our property, that of our out-of-town neighbor to our north and probably also that of the our old friends, the late Burke Davis and Judy Halliburton Burnett Davis, who had a lovely home constructed from old hand-hewn barn timbers across the road to our northwest. We suspect it was one of these bears who tore up part of Burke's prized blueberry patch enclosure of chicken wire stretched on a steel frame last summer. Might have been the same bear that got into one of our blueberry patches in late summer and laid waste to parts of two old but productive blueberry bushes.
One of the McCraws said that in addition to the four bears there are innumerable deer, four coyotes and, in one eyepopping incident, a bobcat who plopped down in the grass within his view from one of the deerstands. He said birds were flitting about, and when one of them made the mistake of lighting in the grass within reach of the bobcat, a paw whipped out, snatched the bird and became a quick snack for the cat. These woods, they say, are getting to be something of "The Wild Kingdom."
A fellow who helps a lot of folks up here keep their plumbing in working order, dropped by the other evening to pass along that some creature had torn off the crawl-space access door to a house down the road, as well as raked his claws on some nearby pine trees. He was giving that crawlspace a pretty wide berth for a little while, he said, just in case an impatient bear with a bad attitude had moved in and was looking for something else to claw to ribbons.
Saturday night we had finished burning a pile of brush and were making a final run to make sure the fire was out. As we drove the pickup along our driveway our headlights flashed on something we hadn't seen before -- two bucks with impressive racks fighting, or at least locking horns while a group of three does a hundred feet or so away watched in our hayfield. I hated that we spoiled the show for the deer -- or interfered with whatever entertainment the deer had planned for that night. But it was riveting to watch in the few moments before all five deer took off for the nearby woods. Looked to me like those boys were having a fine old time, showing off for the girls and maybe hoping to get lucky. It was, after all, Saturday night in the Blue Ridge.
Here's a picture of a critter they call "Mr. Grumpy," taken on Aug. 15 from a camera mounted on a tree a couple hundred feet west of my woodworking shop.
A few days ago Martha B. and our aging French Brittany Spaniel were walking across one of our fields and ran into one of the McCraws, sitting with his rifle by the old corncrib on a warm fall afternoon. She heard that "Mr. Grumpy" might in fact be a "Ms. Grumpy" -- one of four bears they have identified occupying the woods of our property, that of our out-of-town neighbor to our north and probably also that of the our old friends, the late Burke Davis and Judy Halliburton Burnett Davis, who had a lovely home constructed from old hand-hewn barn timbers across the road to our northwest. We suspect it was one of these bears who tore up part of Burke's prized blueberry patch enclosure of chicken wire stretched on a steel frame last summer. Might have been the same bear that got into one of our blueberry patches in late summer and laid waste to parts of two old but productive blueberry bushes.
One of the McCraws said that in addition to the four bears there are innumerable deer, four coyotes and, in one eyepopping incident, a bobcat who plopped down in the grass within his view from one of the deerstands. He said birds were flitting about, and when one of them made the mistake of lighting in the grass within reach of the bobcat, a paw whipped out, snatched the bird and became a quick snack for the cat. These woods, they say, are getting to be something of "The Wild Kingdom."
A fellow who helps a lot of folks up here keep their plumbing in working order, dropped by the other evening to pass along that some creature had torn off the crawl-space access door to a house down the road, as well as raked his claws on some nearby pine trees. He was giving that crawlspace a pretty wide berth for a little while, he said, just in case an impatient bear with a bad attitude had moved in and was looking for something else to claw to ribbons.
Saturday night we had finished burning a pile of brush and were making a final run to make sure the fire was out. As we drove the pickup along our driveway our headlights flashed on something we hadn't seen before -- two bucks with impressive racks fighting, or at least locking horns while a group of three does a hundred feet or so away watched in our hayfield. I hated that we spoiled the show for the deer -- or interfered with whatever entertainment the deer had planned for that night. But it was riveting to watch in the few moments before all five deer took off for the nearby woods. Looked to me like those boys were having a fine old time, showing off for the girls and maybe hoping to get lucky. It was, after all, Saturday night in the Blue Ridge.
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