In This Corner of Maryland, Holidays Mean a Stuffed Ham

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/19/dining/maryland-stuffed-ham.html

Version 0 of 1.

TALL TIMBERS, Md. — William Andrew Dent was the stuffed ham king around here.

Mr. Dent, whom everyone called Andy, died in his sleep last month. He was 56. His brother, David, said the cause was probably a heart attack.

About eight years ago, the Dent brothers took over a little grocery store with a bar and restaurant in the back from their father. He had worked there for years, and finally bought it in the 1970s. That was around the time W J Dent & Sons, the only grocery store in this town of about 500, was building its reputation for having some of the best stuffed hams in Southern Maryland.

Unless you’ve lived in St. Mary’s County or spent a holiday with someone from here, you’ve probably never heard of stuffed ham. Like Cincinnati chili, Jersey Shore rippers and the collard sandwiches of Robeson County, N.C., it is one of America’s most regionally specific dishes, but has never migrated beyond its home. People here cherish it.

There was a time when you’d be hard-pressed to find a family in St. Mary’s County that didn’t make a stuffed ham, at least for Thanksgiving, Christmas or Easter. But here, as everywhere, home cooking waned. Families got smaller. The will and skill needed to boil 20 pounds of cabbage-stuffed ham faded. People turned to country stores like Dent’s to fill the gap.

“We have the second-best stuffed ham in the world,” Andy Dent told me in an interview at his bar the day before he died. “Your grandmother’s is the best. But ours is easier.”

Capturing the precise recipe is like trying to get an artist to explain how to paint a landscape. Still, there are common building blocks. You start with a corned ham, which is a whole, fresh ham that has taken a long vacation in salt. (Good luck, by the way, finding one outside the county — especially one that weighs less than 20 pounds.)

Next, you chop several pounds of cabbage, kale and onions, then perk it all up with enough black and red pepper “to give it some bite,” as cooks here say.

From there, the recipe diverges into a debate that runs the length of the county. In the north, cooks will tell you to add a lot of kale. In the south, kale is just an accent color, if it goes in the stuffing at all. Whether mustard seed, celery seed or celery itself belongs in the stuffing depends on the version you grew up eating.

The stuffing is packed into pockets cut deep into the meat with techniques that vary from cook to cook. What’s left over — and there will be a lot left over — is pressed around the ham. The whole thing is wrapped in cheesecloth (or a clean pillowcase or T-shirt) and boiled for four or five hours.

Then, you drain the ham and set into the refrigerator to chill, although plenty of people just leave it in the cooking liquid out on the back porch during cool weather. You slice it cold, serving the ham as a main dish or tucked into soft potato rolls or between slices of white bread. Don’t ask about mustard or mayonnaise. You don’t want to start an argument.

A ham stuffed with cabbage simmering on the stove for hours makes a lasting olfactory impression, and not necessarily a good one. Unprompted, even the hams biggest fans allow that the smell can linger for days.

“Old-timers used to cook it all day on Christmas Eve, then put the pot on the back porch, go to midnight Mass, come home, have a sandwich and go to bed,” said Daniel Raley, a retired county commissioner whose family used to run a small grocery store in Ridge, Md., that specialized in stuffed ham. “Everyone smelled like stuffed ham at midnight Mass.”

Even though fewer people are cooking the hams, its cultural significance endures. Retired sailors who spent time at the naval station near the mouth of the Patuxent River have had them shipped to California or even Alaska for holidays, the freight costing more than the ham itself. A couple living an hour north in Washington ordered one for their wedding.

Ham makers compete at the county fair. At fund-raising dinners for churches and volunteer fire departments, stuffed ham is set out on long tables along with fried chicken, crab cakes, steamed shrimp or fried oysters. If you’re in a hurry, a volunteer will hand you some in a foam container from a makeshift drive-through. (The hams fell out of favor at community suppers for a few years after a 1997 incident when one woman died and several hundred people got sick after eating stuffed ham tainted with salmonella.)

Stuffed hams are a big auction item, too. Gilbert Murphy, another of the county’s grocery store ham masters, said one of his once brought in $850 for a local charity.

Mr. Murphy runs Murphy’s Town & Country in a part of the county that locals call the Seventh District. The store has been in his family since 1949, before the supermarket chains and the Dollar Generals started moving in, when most people still cooked stuffed hams at home.

He makes about 400 a year selling them for church dinners, to big families who need a holiday centerpiece, and for $12.99 a pound at the store. The Dent brothers sell a lot by the pound, too.

“There are a lot of young people who’ll come get a sandwich, but they’re not going to make one,” Andy Dent said. “They just don’t want to be bothered, but they have to have the ham.”

Mr. Dent would make at least dozen a week. Around Thanksgiving and Christmas, that number doubled. He was particularly proud of his stuffed ham egg rolls, which are a relatively new invention. He sold a lot of $16 pizzas with stuffed ham as a topping, too. Even his cordon bleu, which costs $16 including two side dishes, was stuffed with stuffed ham.

Everyone from St. Mary’s knows that life’s big events should be punctuated with stuffed ham, so they served it at his funeral.

“We sure did,” said his brother, David. “We had stuffed ham sliders and some of the stuffed ham egg rolls.”

How stuffed ham became the specialty of St. Mary’s County isn’t a question with an easy answer, said Joyce White, a food historian in Maryland.

The ham has a very distant British cousin called stuffed chine. The dish, from Lincolnshire, is made from a brined chunk of pork taken from between the shoulder blades. Herbs are stuffed into slashes in the meat, and then the whole thing is boiled in muslin.

Ms. White and other regional historians say it’s more likely that the dish has Afro-Caribbean roots; indentured or enslaved West Africans would season the greens and onions left over in the winter garden with red pepper, and stuff it into jowls or whatever chunks of pork they had on hand.

But as in so many parts of the South, the line between black and white food is blurry.

Stuffed ham recipes have shown up in “The Virginia Housewife,” which Mary Randolph published in 1824, but the ham is smoked. Recipes with cabbage and brined ham are more prominent in “300 Years of Black Cooking in St. Mary’s County,” which was published in 1975 and traces the history of the ham back centuries.

“It floated up and got adopted into the white food traditions,” Ms. White said. “When you’re cooking and you can’t read, you are going to follow your own instinct and taste but adjust it for the white people for whom you are cooking.”

The result is an amalgam of a dish, with a cooking method that has been developed and passed on in classic folk tradition — with generations of observation and repetition, both in black households and white.

The tradition continues in the house on St. George’s Creek where Bobby and Pat Bowes lived for 50 years. Bobby Bowes, another one of Southern Maryland’s great ham stuffers, died in February at age 76.

During the last 30 years of his life, he must have stuffed more than 1,000 hams to raise money for the Roman Catholic Church and schools their seven children attended. Ever the engineer, he built a 4-foot-by-8-foot plywood table covered in plastic to make the process of stuffing dozens of hams at once a little more efficient.

Every Christmas, he would haul it into the kitchen for a ham-stuffing party. Friends would bring their boiling pots and several pounds of chopped vegetables, dumping them onto the communal table.

Preparing the stuffing is one of those culinary tasks certain men like to take on. Mr. Bowes took it very seriously. The stuffing wasn’t ready until he had spiced it precisely, using a formula that was impossible to quantify but boiled down to this: If it looks right, smells right and tastes right, then it’s right.

A film crew recorded his last ham-stuffing project, this one for a church fund-raiser in November. Mr. Bowes and a team of volunteers stuffed 55 hams. The session will be featured in “Eatin’ the Chesapeake: The Five Feasts,” a show that premieres April 23 on Maryland Public Television.

Over the past few years, Mrs. Bowes said, she and her husband talked about whether they should stop the ham-stuffing parties. They were both getting old, and the kitchen was always so crowded when they set up the table. Still, the idea that the family tradition might end made them sad.

“You wonder, if Mom and Dad die, are the kids going to take it up?” Mrs. Bowes said.

At least one is. For the past few years, their son Matt, who works for the electric company and has four children of his own, has been slowly learning the craft. In fact, last Christmas his father acted more like an executive chef, giving final approval to his son’s stuffing.

This Christmas, for the first time, Matt will be on his own at the table. Standing in his parents’ kitchen a few weeks ago, the thought brought a lump to his throat.

“I’m ready,” he said. “At least, I think I’m ready.”

Recipe: Stuffed Ham, Southern Maryland-Style

And to drink ...

My first inclination is to pair this sweet and savory stuffed ham with a platter of fresh biscuits. Even then, we’ll still need something to drink. Riesling is just the thing, especially the versatile spätlese riesling from Germany, which has just enough sweetness to ward off any spicy kick in the stuffing, balanced by refreshing acidity. If you shy away from sweetness in wine, try a dry riesling from Germany or, maybe even better, from Austria, where the rieslings have a little more body. You could also drink sparking wine. Brut Champagne would be great, as would a good Champagne-style sparkler from elsewhere in France, Italy or the United States. Sparkling Vouvray would be delicious, too. For reds, try a village-level Burgundy or a restrained pinot noir. ERIC ASIMOV

Follow NYT Food on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest. Get regular updates from NYT Cooking, with recipe suggestions, cooking tips and shopping advice.