Erikka Askeland: Ducking out of ham and turkey this year

IF there is one thing I have learned, it is that ham is complicated. I have tried cooking it with several variations on the soaking, boiling, glazing, baking, with tin foil and without.

The first time I embarked upon a ham, it was brilliant, I have to admit, and I could probably even dig up some witnesses if required to testify.

But I’ll be damned if I can remember what it was I did to produce such a near perfect confection of pig meat. And all other attempts have not quite reached its dizzy heights, I am sad to report.

My sticky issues with cured pork emerged when considering the subject of our first Christmas dinner of the year. The first because the Man in My Life and I were embarking on a visit to his tiny mum in Norfolk before the actual day and there seemed no reason not to whip up a festive dinner while we were there.

But let it be said turkey was never going to be on the menu. Not just because there would only be three of us, making a big roast redundant, but I have a wish-bone to pick with the traditional bird.

The dear recently departed wit, Christopher Hitchens, once remarked that the four most overrated things in life are Champagne, lobster, a certain sexual practice not suitable to be mentioned in a family paper and picnics. A variation on this list, if he’d asked me, would be to keep the bubbly but I’d give him turkey.

The only reason for serving a turkey is because it is big enough to feed a crowd and comparatively cheap. Which is why North American settlers started eating them – for Thanksgiving however, many hundreds of years ago.

That, and the birds are notoriously stupid and easy to catch, even for some hard up, scurvied Puritans just off the boat. But even then I’m sure America’s founding mothers failed to ensure that the whole thing was cooked through sufficiently without producing dry meat that tasted mostly of sawdust.

Only culinary ingenuity has maintained the bird’s pre-eminence on the Christmas dinner table, whether that is the sage-infused stuffing, the giblet gravy or yes, even cranberry sauce (remember that this sour berry was a source of much needed vitamin C for those malnourished New Englanders).

But my American cousin seems to have taken this to a new level – this year he brined his turkey. Yes, that is soaking it in a solution of water, salt and sugar for days in advance.

Having seen a picture of what must have been a great, lumbering beast in its oven tray on Facebook, I was impressed. But not convinced.

So it was to be the ham conundrum. Or rather gammon, because for some reason in Britain we make a distinction between the two.

The internet is a Bad Thing if you are unsure how to cook it. Some websites say it needs soaking overnight, others say it is no longer necessary because the new-fangled curing process is less salty. Then, boiling, or roasting or both?

And then what to boil it in – water? Stock? Or perhaps, if you have happened upon one of those a little too ingenious American cookery websites, in Coca-Cola?

But it was his tiny mum who came to the rescue. Rather than choosing a gammon from the bewildering array of smoked/unsmoked/Wiltshire-maple-cured-plastic-wrapped bags of dense pink stuff at the supermarket, she went to her local butchers.

Then she recalled without recourse to books or any websites the precise amount of time per pound it needed to be boiled – in water – and then honey and cloves for glazing and baking. So I thought, here goes nothing.

Perhaps, in the end, the oven was a little too hot because the blackened thing that came out of it was initially alarming. But once the worst of the burned bits was wiped away, it looked good and revealed tender pink meat on the inside. Maybe not a triumph, but it was a fine ham.

So I have decided our second Christmas lunch will instead be a much less complicated roast duck. Served with champagne, with which we will toast his mum, our families, maybe even the memory of Christopher Hitchens, and you.

Merry Christmas.