Why Didn’t the Spanish Dry-Cure Ham in Mexico?
It was not for want of trying, I’m pretty sure. Instead it was for want of a suitable climate. Dry curing ham requires humid winters with temperatures that hover above freezing and warm, dry summers. The high central plateau of New Spain (Mexico) has warm, dry winters and cool, moist summers. That’s just the reverse of what’s needed to dry-cure hams. And the subtropical lowlands are too warm and too moist year round. So no dry-cured ham in Mexico.
But that’s to get ahead
What is ham?
Traditionally a ham is the hind leg of a pig that has been preserved by salting (and sometimes smoking as well, though that is not relevant here). Salting is carried out in two main ways. For dry-cured ham, the leg was rubbed with dry salt. For wet curing, the leg was immersed in brine made by dissolving salt in brine. Countless minor variations of timing, flavoring, and aging have been, and continue to be tried.
(To be clear, except for country hams, few commercial hams in the US are made this way. Instead pieces of pork are pieced today and injected with brine).
The global distribution of dry-cured ham
Since Antiquity, Spain has been famous for its dry-cured ham, two of the most famous are those now called jamón ibérico (Iberian ham) and jamón serrano (mountain ham). You may be more familiar with an Italian equivalent, prosciutto crudo—raw ham, generally just called prosciutto in the US.
Certain parts of Europe (including the ham-making regions in Spain and Italy), certain parts of the United States, and certain parts of China have just the right climates for dry-curing ham. And wherever those conditions occur, so do dry-cured hams. The methods of making them, for all the regional variations, bear a family resemblance.
In Spain, in the traditional ham-making regions, farmers slaughtered pigs in early winter when the temperature was just above freezing and the relative humidity was 80-90%. The hams were salted. During this stage, the salt penetrated the meat, the cold prevented the growth of nasty microorganisms, and the high relative humidity allowed a surface brine to form.
During the second stage the hams dried, rested and mature at 75 to 85 degrees C and a relative humidity below 75% for 6-12 months or longer. The low humidity dried out the ham and slowed down mold growth, while the temperature allowed the microbiological and chemical changes that created flavor and prevented excessive drying as the fat rendered.
Back to the Spanish transfer of cuisine to the Americas
When the Spanish (more accurately, a mix of Europeans) began settling in the Americas in the sixteenth century, they had no intention of subsisting on indigenous maize, beans, squash, and chilies. To do so would have been literally to change who they were. Rebecca Earle explains just why at length in The Body of the Conquistador.
Instead, the settlers brought everything necessary to recreate the European diet in Mexico, as I and Jeff Pilcher have argued. They introduced farm animals such as the all-important pig, along with cattle, sheep and goats) and crops, notably wheat. They brought bread ovens and European kitchen equipment. They imported recipe books, particularly Francisco Martinez Motiño´s Arte de Cocina (1623). And they used European table settings.
But no dry-cured ham in Mexico
The Spanish discovered that there were limits to re-creating their cuisine in the Americas. Hams and dried sausages of the chorizo kind, could not be reproduced , even though Mexico has plenty of salt for curing.
In Mexico City, even in January, the coldest month, the lowest temperatures are in the mid 40s, while they reach 70 during the day. The relative humidity is around 55%. Too warm and too dry for stage one.
In May and June, the rains come. Even if the daytime temperatures rise to the high 70s, at night they sink into the mid 50s. Meanwhile the relative humidity gets up to over 85%. Too cool and too wet for stage two.
So no dry-cured hams. And by the time temperature control came around, the cultural tradition had been lost.
Please, someone, please! Create an atlas of food processing and climate
An atlas of food processing methods mapped on to climate would reveal so much about the history of food and culture. Whether meat is dried, or preserved in fat, or salted and smoked: whether fish is dried, or made into fish sauce: whether milk is boiled down to a thick sugary cream, or made into hard cheese. All these processed and many more depended on climate in the days before air conditioning.
The Columbian ‘Exchange’ was not an exchange of food
Here I am on my old hobby horse. The Columbian Exchange was not an exchange of foods. It was a transfer of food resources (plants and animals).
Pigs went to Mexico, dry-cured hams did not. Maize went to Europe, but treating maize with alkali did not. Chiles made it round the world, but pureed chile sauces did not either. Nor did the extensive use of nopales (paddle cactus) or agave for foods.
* I wrote this post in response to a discussion with George Gale and Pamela Gordon on the Facebook Group Culinary Travel run by Jonell Galloway, The Rambling Epicure.
I was greatly helped by Chef Bob Perry at the University of Kentucky. In a coming post, more about Bob, the country hams of Kentucky, and my history with English ham.
**In Italy, dry cured ham (prosciutto), Gastrochemist reports winter salting at 40 degrees F (4 C) for a month, followed by drying at 55 F (13 C) with relative humidity of 65%, and aging at 62 F (17C) with relative humidity of 50%.
In China, the most famous dry cured hams are from Jinhua in Zhejiang province. Chinese scientists have studied the processing technology and report salting at 5-10 degrees C for a month with a relative humidity of 75-85%, sun drying at 20 C or higher, and ripening at 40C with low humidity.
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Excellent Rachel, makes perfect sense. Before mechanical climate control, you can only make the foods that your climate allows you to make. And this is the first time I’ve run into the notion that the Columbian ‘exchange’ was not an exchange of *food*. But of course! Sheesh, I’d never thought of that before, but it’s totally obvious once it’s pointed out.
Great piece! Not only did I learn a lot, it’s fun!
Thanks, George. I bet you have wine analogies. And where yeasts do and don’t flourish is another big determinant on what you can do with raw materials.
Hi Rachel, very similar circumstances here in eastern Australia (colonised by British from late 1780s). It is often asked why local fish and small game weren’t salted but too humid. Smoking a possibility but for larger animals wet brine pickling was the safest bet, first dry-salting pork and pressing between slabs of wood to expel moisture, then packing in more salt in sealed barrels, in which brine would naturally occur.
Bring on that map!!
Regards, Jacqui
Thanks so much for this helpful contribution. I need to look at your dissertation again but I assume that method came from wet England. As I will say in my next post, traditionally families in Wiltshire where I am from dry salted but ate up within the year, thus not creating the long-keeping hams.
As I think about it, this map would have be be pretty detailed. Or maybe for a first shot one could just do very general outlines. I’d love to do it but don’t have access to the right resources at the moment.
I missed your posts and wondered what happened to you!
Hope you have been well.
Any author would be pleased to know that their posts are missed, so many thanks for saying that. My husband had a long illness prior to his death last year and bloging was one of the luxuries that had to go. But the aftermath is pretty much over now and I am looking forward to blogging regularly.
Dear Rachel (if I may),
I am very intrigued by the idea of the atlas, but I wonder how it might work. From my own perspective here in China, I foresee some organizational challenges around how to map local traditions while accounting for historical change. These are by no means insurmountable problems but suggest that this kind of project would require a team with diverse expertise.
An atlas is a remarkably good idea. Do you know if anyone is actually working on such a thing?
Several people have liked the idea of an atlas. I think the climate/processing connections are well known to food scientists but not to food historians. Certainly the massive literature on hams in France, Italy, Germany, Spain and China is very precise on this. More crossover would be good. I agree entirely about the complexity of the task though. Either you have something very generalized like the University of Kentucky map of dry-cured hams or you have something very detailed on almost a county level that takes into account changes in relief.
And that’s without paying any attention to the cultural changes you mention. I didn’t say anything about it in my blog but someone must have written on the history of cured meats in al-Andaluz. That would also have been reflected in the transfer of techniques to the subsequent Spanish empire.
I don’t know of anyone working on such an atlas. It would have, as you say, to be a team project.
So good to read you again. Your post on the geography of dry-cured hams was mind-opening. It feels good! It also sent me racing down to the basement to check on the humidity for the Virginia-cured ham that is currently hanging from a pipe in the ceiling.
Hope the humidity was nice and low. Thank you for reading again after a long absence.
Great to have you post again!
It’s often assumed by some that trade of ingredients means trades of dishes as well. It might but not always or even usually imo. For example I once read a food historian who speculated the origin of baba ganouj was in India simply because eggplants come from India or somewhere nearby without any other evidence.
Speaking of salting were the Romans responsible for diffusing this practice throughout Southern Europe? And did they learn it from anyone else?
A post on sausages might be interesting too. Those seem to be the more common with the oldest recorded sausages being traced to Western Asia.
Thank you. It’s great to be posting again. I completely agree that the trade of ingredients does not necessarily bring with it a trade of dishes.
I’m not sure about the early history of hams. Cato has instructions for ham making in De Agricultura. There are references to hams in northern Europe in classical literature.
Sausages, at least pork sausages, go hand in hand with ham, I think.
More on hams next week.
Speaking of climate and food, maple and birch syrup is interesting. The climate in some part of Europe should have supported the use of maple/birch sap and its processing into syrup. And while there is good evidence of sap usage the processing into syrup is a process less known in Europe. Its a bit harder to make the syrup in Europe for climatic reasons but it still could have been done but it wasn’t for some reason..
Were there maples in Europe? Birch, very much yes. I don’t have an answer to this one.
Yes. Norway maples are indigenous to most of Europe. According to this article the ones in Poland (https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.2478/s11535-013-0284-8/html) contain a similar sugar content to North American sugar maples.
And this article suggests the transformation of maple sap into syrup was carried out by some Uralic ethnic groups in NW Russia.
https://pbsociety.org.pl/journals/index.php/asbp/article/view/asbp.2012.036/998
Regarding the early history of hams I saw some false claims than Jinhua ham is somehow the ancestor of European ham via Marco Polo
https://www.tasteatlas.com/jinhua-ham-the-oldest-cured-ham-in-the-world
https://www.sbs.com.au/food/article/2018/11/03/over-1000-years-ham-heres-where-it-all-began
https://academic.oup.com/af/article/2/4/62/4638718
How do these claims make any sense? De Agricultura is dated to 160 BC. The first mentions of Chinese hams dates to the Tang dynasty (~600 to 900 AD). Marco Polo didn’t make it to China till the 13th century.
I sometimes wonder how claims like these pop up and get repeated as truth without anyone fact checking them.
Food history is full of myths and untruths. You are quite right that this is one of them.
Another untruth is how the Hamburg steak and hamburger have their roots in meat tenderized by being placed under the horse saddles of Turkic/Mongol soldiers. That meat was not minced or anything. And it would have been sweaty at the end of the day so its unlikely it was even eaten. But somehow that myth has spread too.
The Marco Polo myth also includes pasta, which was supposedly taught to Italian sailors “by a beautiful village girl.” The origin of that story? A 1920s ad campaign by an American macaroni company.
Never knew that was the origin. Thanks.
That’s almost as ridiculous as the myth that pizza is somehow descended from chinese scallion pancakes via Marco Polo. And then there is the myth that gelato also somehow came to Europe via Marco Polo despite gelato/ice cream being a fusion European-Middle Eastern food and really having nothing to do with the far east.
If you trace back on some of the links you’ll find the source of the article, if not the story: a puff piece by Cathay Pacific.
Also Jason iberico is the king of hams for sure. Other hams just don’t come close.
I think there’s a bit more to it than climate – all those places listed in the Southern US that make ham are far more humid and often warmer than the Mexican Altiplano. I would not be surprised if in fact there was some level of dry-cured ham production, especially in places like Puebla, into the 19th century.
There’s plenty of Spanish staples, perfectly suited to the Mexican climate, whose Mexican production was limited or curtailed by the colonial government: olives are the major example. I can’t help but wonder if the same happened with dry-cured meats to some extent.