Democratic Sentinel, Volume 12, Number 5, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 February 1888 — Henry W. Grady’s Discourse on Ham. [ARTICLE]

Henry W. Grady’s Discourse on Ham.

Why is it we cannot buy now the sweet, old-fashioned country ham? Judge Samuel Lumpkin lately sent to the writer a half-dozen from his private smoke-house, of the vintage of 1884, that are simply poems in ashes. Any self-respecting pig would have died gladly to have been so idealized. In these hams you catch thd flavor of the smoke of the half-smothered oak chips, above which they drifted with the seasons into perfection. And the red gravy—excuse these drooling lips —clear, consistent, flavorous, it is such gravy as you used to find on your mother’s table when you came home from a long day’s hunt in the December wind. I had rather have a, smokehouse with its loamy floor, its darkened rafters, its red-pepper pots, its festoons of sausages odorous with sage, and a hundred such hams suspended between earth and roof; like small Machet, than a cellar of dust-begrimed bottles of Madeira of ’23. Has the art of curing hams in the Georgia smoke-houses become a lost one? Shall red gravy go, with Tyrian purple, into the realms of the impossible? —Atlanta Constitution.