That'll Do, Pig

At once sumptuous yet simple, a ham is an age-old tradition that, for many, is the real highlight of the Christmas feasting. Flora Watkins digs in

FOR some, Christmas doesn’t really get under way until Carols from King’s and the first strains of Once in Royal David’s City on the wireless. However, for Neale Hollingsworth of Dukeshill Ham in Shropshire, the festivities begin a week earlier, when he loads up his car to make a very special delivery.

‘I always know that Christmas has arrived because I personally take The Queen’s hams to Sandringham,’ Mr Hollingsworth divulges. Since receiving the Royal Warrant in 2003, ‘it’s become a bit of a tradition’.

Around the country, from royal households to the more humble, Christmas hams, in their glazed and clove-studded Dickensian glory, are central to the festivities—and have been for centuries. Ham has been used as feast food since the time of the romans, explains writer and food historian Kate Colquhoun, author of Taste: The Story of Britain Through Its Cooking (Bloomsbury, £12.99): ‘Apicius has recipes for boiled and spiced honeyed hams and “pig” is an Anglo-Saxon word.’

This was a celebratory food that could be enjoyed by rich and poor alike. ‘other meat was expensive, but a pig was the thing that nearly every peasant had,’ notes Miss Colquhoun. ‘They’d put it in the wood in the autumn, to forage on beech nuts, slaughter it and preserve it to have meat through the winter.’

Hogs would be killed at Michaelmas and made into sausages and black pudding, with flitches of bacon hung in the chimney to smoke by the fire. When the time came to eat the hams, they would be boiled, then dressed according to fashion and status.

Mustard seed was what peasants had access to, but, for the rich, hams could be ‘carriers of fashion’, according to Miss Colquhoun. They would have been decorated with spices in the Middle Ages and, in the Tudor period, oranges, which were fashionable and new.