The American holiday ham, scored into diamonds, studded with cloves, and pinned with pineapple rings and cherries
Origin: United States
From the journey of Pineapple.
The clove-studded ham with pineapple rings pinned to it in a grid, a maraschino cherry in the centre of each, is one of the most photographed objects in American domestic cooking, and it is almost entirely a creation of the tin and of the advertising that came with it. The underlying dish is old. Glazing a cured ham with something sweet is European and long predates any pineapple: sugar, honey, or cider against salt pork is a very old pairing, and studding the fat with cloves is medieval. What changed in the United States between the wars was the arrival of cheap canned pineapple from the Hawaiian plantations, together with a marketing effort that was among the most sophisticated of its era. Dole and its competitors put the decorated ham into magazine advertisements, into recipe leaflets tucked under tin lids, and into the new Home Economics curriculum, and within twenty years it had become what Americans understood a festive ham to look like. The decoration is doing more than decorating. The scored diamond grid opens the fat so the glaze penetrates and the surface crisps; the cloves push flavour into the fat rather than sitting on it; and the pineapple rings baste the joint as they cook, their acidity cutting through the salt of the cure in exactly the way the accompanying mustard does. It is served at Easter and at Christmas, and it is expected to yield several days of sandwiches afterwards, which is much of the reason a whole joint is cooked for a meal that could be managed with a great deal less. The ham is the point on the day; the cold ham is the point for the rest of the week.
Tinned rings are traditional and they behave better than fresh. Fresh pineapple contains bromelain, which digests protein, and rings left on the surface of a ham for the length of a bake will break the meat down beneath them into something soft and grey. Canning destroys the enzyme. If using fresh, caramelise the rings in a dry pan first and add them only for the final fifteen minutes. Soak the joint overnight in cold water if it is a heavily dry-cured ham, changing the water once. Supermarket gammon rarely needs it. The glaze takes well to substitution: maple syrup or dark honey for the brown sugar, bourbon for a third of the pineapple juice, or a spoonful of chipotle in adobo for a Southwestern version. Ground allspice or a stick of cinnamon in the glaze pan is a Caribbean-influenced variant. The leftovers are half the reason for the dish. The bone should go into a pot of split pea or bean soup, and the cold ham into sandwiches with mustard for the rest of the week.
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