some kinda good

I once heard a Yankee come-here complain about Virginia weddings. “They always have that ham,” she said, with her nostrils flared and eyebrows raised, “and biscuits. AND they act like it’s something special.”

Well, yes. We do. And yes. It is.

Spaniards have serrano, Italians have prosciutto, Tyroleans have speck; we have Virginia ham — country, salt-cured.

My grandmother hung her hams in the smokehouse by the chicken room. Smoke seemed to seep from the wood in the ceiling and the air felt crusty from the salt as it hit the nostrils. I loved to drop by her kitchen for homemade bread with little chunks of cold butter and a thin slice of her ham. Special? You bet.

At Christmas, many homes back then had a baked salt-cured ham waiting in the fridge for “when people dropped by.” A country ham biscuit with a punch cup full of bourbon-laced eggnog was a welcome, singular flavor combination that transported you to Christmas. And everyone agreed that Sue Eustace’s hams were the best. She insisted it wasn’t in the curing, but in the baking. Her recipe is far afield from any other I’ve seen for Virginia ham, and it remains our family’s favorite way to bake them.

It’s Christmastime again, and a native-Virginia friend called last night to ask how to cook a country ham. I thumbed through my recipes and found Aunt Sue’s method for Bill, who will be serving it to his parents, children, and siblings. And here it is for you, too, just in time for Christmas.

Aunt Sue’s Country Ham
Sue Eustace, Catlett, Va.

A roaster with a tight lid or a large baking pan with heavy duty foil to cover.
A whole or half salt-cured country ham

Soak the ham as you normally would. [I soak mine for at least 24 hours, changing the soaking water from time to time.] Scrub the mold, pepper, etc. off the ham.

Preheat oven to 500˚ F.

Put the ham in the roaster pan w/6 cups water. Close as tightly as possible. Put ham in preheated oven; cook for 15 minutes. Don’t open the oven while it is cooking or afterward.

Turn off heat, but leave the ham/roaster in oven. Leave for three hours.

After three hours, without removing ham from oven, reheat oven to 500˚. When the temperature reaches 500˚, leave the heat on for 15 minutes. Turn off heat, but again leave the ham in the oven. This time, leave the ham until it and the oven reach room temperature.

(I usually start this process about four hours before bedtime so that the last heating comes just before bedtime. I leave the ham in the oven until morning.)

A note – it is relatively easy to bone the ham while it is slightly warm or at room temp. Once it is cold, it is too hard to bone.

Trim off skin and serve.

The first house I owned had a half bath tucked under an upstairs eve. On the mirror over the rust-stained sink was a sticker that read, “Don’t floss all your teeth, just the ones you want to keep.”

I want to keep all my teeth. I use them a lot, I like them, and I like what they do for me.

Is there an excuse these days not to glide the slick white thread between the teeth? Space-age polymers and the like mean there’s no getting stuck and shredding like back in the bad old days of dental hygiene. So, for my pearly whites, the answer is “no.”

Dental floss starts with D, and on day four of gratiblogging, I am appreciative of it.

(my brand, with space-age polymers)

(Catlett's Station, around 1862)

Catlett was a little village when I was born and raised in there in the 1960s. The kids all went to church together until age 6, when they started going to school together, too. Our elementary – grades one through four – was four classrooms and a long cooler in the hallway for three-cent lunch milk. The building was wooden, painted white, with huge tall windows that opened to the breeze, and with a huge bell swinging in the belfry.

My great-great-grandfather had moved to the village when it was called Catlett’s Station, and he put a general store right on the railroad in 1866. Just four years earlier Jeb Stuart and his men had raided John Pope’s supply lines there, during second Manassas.

My father, who was born in 1931, farmed the same land his great-grandfather and grandfather had farmed. His father ran the mercantile, then still spitting distance from the railroad tracks. When dad was a kid, the business sold everything there from caskets and crackers to moonshine.

My grandmother and I walked hot rolls and soup to the shut-ins. Two curious men, Chicken and Preacher Parsons, strolled together all day, never working, living their lives to mystify me generate conversation around Catlett’s 6-o’clock-sharp dinner tables. Every summer the community had a fireman’s parade and a July Fourth celebration with fireworks and a hamburger stand.

Catlett held all manner of entertainment to a small child: fishing and digging and playing with friends. And it was the most boring place on the earth to a 16-year-old.

Catlett is still on the map; you can drive through it to places with names we’d never heard back then – Fair Oaks Mall, Nissan Pavilion.

But Catlett is gone, too. And I am grateful to have been there.

Winterbrook Farm

My friend Shannon proposed 26 Letters in 26 Days, in which one blogs for the first 26 days in November about 26 things one is thankful for and using the ordered letters of the alphabet. Sounds like fun and a good way to take stock of the good stuff. November snuck up on me or my mind is slipping or whatever; I’m a day late starting.

And, I’m starting now:

When my children were little, they had three little books their dad had from his childhood years in London. All were about Ant and Bee, an ant and a bee who were dear friends and who lived together in a Cup. Ant and Bee had adventures that took them on 26-page-or-so tours of the alphabet. They met a Dog, they had Tea, they walked by a Yew tree, they turned on a Spigot.

These were sturdy little volumes with homespun illustrations that made me feel grounded and safe. I loved the words, and I loved reading them to my kids. Each volume felt comfortable in my hands, manageable while I snuggled a child in one arm and carefully pointed out words and drawings.

Bee

Ant

I’m grateful for Ant and Bee, for grandparents who once were parents who read to a son who became a father who saved some books from long-ago London to read in 1980s Mobile and 1990s Fredericksburg to the children I cherish – Always.

My grandmother, who was of the Trumbos and Mathiases of West Virginia, grew the lima beans her family brought with them from the mountains. My father’s mother, she was the youngest of six and was happy to have been born in relatively flat, fertile southern Fauquier County, Va. She saved her limas every fall, as a handful of my cousins still do today.

When they started gardening in the 1950s, my mother and father turned from tradition and raised a Burpee climbing variety. They bought “fresh” seed each spring, until the early ’70s, when my mother read in the small, gray pages of Organic Gardening about Dr. Martin’s lima beans. The piece claimed Dr. Martin’s were the best beans anywhere, were hard to find, and were even harder to grow – but they were worth it.

A couple in New Jersey sent my mother her first seeds. Every year, my mother ordered from them. Through the years, they became good friends over the beautiful lime-green legumes, exchanging by mail not only seeds, but newsy letters, growing tips, and photos of the beans.

My mother and I swear Dr. Martin’s ruin you for other lima beans. They are tasty and enormous with a creamy texture. They never get mealy – even when the beans get to two inches long. Because of that, they grow on her farm, where what was nearly an acre of garden has shrunk to a small plot. And they grow in my little city yard, where there is barely enough sun to produce a worthwhile crop.

Mom lost track of the N.J. couple after the Mrs. had a stroke several years ago. Now, with no certain supplier, my mother carefully saves the seeds each year, as I do.

In Virginia, you’ve got to start Dr. Martin’s lima beans indoors well before the last frost. In mid-April, I soak the beans saved from the previous harvest. When they are soft, I tuck them in individual peat pots in the best soil I can find. A tray-full, covered with plastic wrap and settled on a warm heating pad, makes a cozy nursery. Usually I’ll see the burst bean emerge through the soil, surrounding the new leaves, in five to seven days.

After this, the plants need full warm sun or a grow light to produce sturdy stems and the characteristic emerald leaves so eager to climb. The full-size plants can reach 12-15 feet in the garden, so they’ll need strong support and lots of room to grow.

Plant them in the garden before the soil warms and they won’t do much but chill. Plant them in full sun in warm, rich soil, four-to-six feet apart and they’ll take off. Though they prefer tall supports, mine are homemade bamboo trellises that are about seven-feet tall. My mother has rows of permanent wire fences in her garden, devoted solely to her Dr. Martin’s.

Given what they need, the young plants will spend June laying vine and foliage, then the blossoms – and the bees – will come. Dr. Martin’s limas teach patience – the very minimum time I’ve waited to get the first single bean is 90 days from in-ground planting. To get a good mess of them takes four months of full sun, water, and no ground hogs.

Once the pods appear, leave them on the vine until they are heavy and full. Hold them up to the sunlight to check the bean size. But don’t judge Dr. Martin’s by other garden variety limas – let them get much larger. These beans are delicious even when they are one-and-a-half-inches long. Though you can eat them at any size, don’t let them hang until they harden and dry, except the ones you want to save for next year. Unless frost is imminent, I don’t harvest them unless the beans are at least an inch long.

Just as they were more than 30 years ago, Dr. Martin’s lima beans are still difficult to find. The first year I didn’t have my own, I ordered the Pennsylvania heirloom from the Landis Valley Museum. The New York Times reported that they are sometimes offered to members of the Seed Savers Exchange, and by Rohrer Seeds.

Every year when the heat of summer hits – after all the sprouting and the potting and the trellising and the growing – I SWEAR that I’ll never grow these pain-in-the-back beans again. Then, late August comes, with swelling pods and bees on beautiful blossoms and the promise of fall. By mid-October, the weather has turned cool, and I’m harvesting them under a blue sky, maybe shelling them with a friend as the leaves are beginning to put on a show. I cook up a pot, with a little butter and black pepper, and it’s all worth it. They really are that good.

Dr. Martin's lima beans, on the vine