The message
from "madgardener" contains these words:

and over here we still have good old fashioned "Country Ham" which is VERY
salty and smoked and keeps forever. If there is a teeny bit of mold on it,
you just rinse it off and slice it and use it anyway. We slice and fry it
with breakfast and make "red-eye gravy" with the drippings of country ham,

Quite right too...

leftover hunks and the bone are thrown into pots of either dried white or
pinto beans or green beans and cooked until any meat falls off the
bones and
the marrow is dissolved..............

I do the same with stuff the butcher throws my way - it may look
ghastly, dry and shrivelled, but I get the stuff a a vastly reduced
price, or often, gratis.

And it's always properly cured stuff.

then the dawgs get the bones to
gnaw......

*NEVER* give dogs bones which have been boiled!

yummm, country ham isn't for the faint hearted. It IS salty! My
daddy used to send me a whole ham of country ham from the local pig farm
when we lived in Colorado because back then you couldn't find it. And he'd
also send me 10 pound bags of Martha White self rising cornmeal in
white and
yellow because you couldn't find self rising yellow cornmeal. When I
say I'm
Southern, I am really Southern..g

That was becoming abundantly evident...

(for New Year's the tradition is to
make a pot of black eyed peas with the ham bone from the Christmas ham, and
throw a silver dime into the pot of simmering peas. Whoever finds the dime
has good luck all year.........this was my FIRST year I didn't make a
pot of
black eyed peas for News Year!) in my family, a pan of either
cornbread or
golden brown "drop" bread to go with it slathered in butter hot from the
oven in a black iron skillet was the topper with the peas and ham pieces.

I often make peas pudding with the ham - or rather, with some of the ham
stock, as cooking peas in stock will allow it to go 'off' a great deal
quicker.

I prefer using green split peas, though the resulting pudding is
somewhat lumpier than that made with yellow ones. (I have been known to
'homogenise' it in a food processor.)

--
Rusty
Direct reply to: horrid dot squeak snailything zetnet point co period uk
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