A More Perfect Plate Dispatch #3: Ham & The American Smokehouse

Have you ever driven past an old farm and wondered what all the buildings were used for?

I certainly have!

Next time you’re driving on a country road past one of those old farmsteads, look for a small, windowless outbuilding. If you spot one, congratulations, there's a decent chance you're looking at a smokehouse, and for many early American farmers, that humble little building was the difference between a comfortable winter and a very hungry one.

This week's Dispatch is about how Americans kept meat from spoiling before refrigeration existed, and why the answer to that problem ended up shaping what we eat to this day.

Make yourself a ham sandwich and get ready to read the story behind pigs, ham, and the American smokehouse.

This story starts with pigs. Here’s a little bit about the history of pigs in America.

With our love of pork (and the fact that wild pigs are everywhere in the south) it’s easy to assume that pigs have always been in the Americas.

Nope – in truth, pigs are not native to the Americas at all! They first came over with the Spanish. Columbus carried pigs to Cuba on his second voyage in 1493, and in 1539, the explorer Hernando de Soto landed in Florida with a small herd, according to the legend spread by the National Pork Producers Council, just 13 animals.

Pigs are prolific reproducers, and these 13 pigs did what pigs do: they thrived, multiplied, and spread across the Southeast, becoming the ancestors of today's wild razorbacks that are a scourge across the southern parts of America.

It wasn’t just the Spaniards who brought pork to the Americas. The English colonists brought their own pigs, and Virginia turned out to be hog heaven. Two years after Jamestown was founded in 1607, the settlement already had more than 500 pigs among its population.

Colonists quickly figured out that pigs were low-maintenance livestock. While cattle need pasture, fencing, and lots of care, pigs need nothing. You just turn them loose in the woods where they fatten themselves on acorns and roots, and whatever else they can find.  When you needed food, you rounded them up and harvested them.

If TikTok had existed in Colonial America, there’d be some influencer saying pigs were the ultimate farmer life hack!

By the 1800s, pork wasn't just America's favorite meat; it was THE American meat! In the South before the Civil War, the average person ate about 150 pounds of pork a year – today it’s only around 50 – 55 pounds!

A doctor named John S. Wilson looked at the national diet in 1860 and declared that the country should really be called "the great Hog-eating Confederacy, or the Republic of Porkdom.” He meant it as a complaint about our diets, but I think a lot of Americans would read it as a national achievement.

What I think may be the most impressive thing about that 150-pound total was that most of it wasn’t fresh cuts like the pork chops or pork tenderloins we love today – it was preserved pork cuts like ham, salt pork, and more. Could you imagine eating 150 pounds of ham in a year???

Did those early Americans just love salt? Didn’t they know how to grill? Why no pork chops, only ham?

Before modern refrigeration, fresh meat would spoil within days, especially in the heat of summer. It’s all well and good to harvest a pig, but unless you and your family could eat a whole pig in a day or two (really an impossible task, although maybe MrBeast will make it a YouTube challenge some day), you’d soon run out of edible food.

You couldn’t eat a whole hog before it spoiled, so the only way to get 150 pounds of pork a year out of your animals was to make most of it last through preservation.

So, when the first hard frost of the year would come, farmers would gather together for one of the biggest work days of the year: hog killing time.

Before reliable refrigeration, cold weather was the only thing keeping fresh meat from spoiling while you worked, so farm families waited for a reliable cold snap, usually late November into December, before butchering the pigs. That cold gave them time to work without fear of spoilage.

Hog killing day was a community event, think of a barn raising with a pork grillout at the end. Accounts from across the rural South and Midwest describe the same scene: neighbors and family gathering for a multi-day affair, men doing the slaughtering and butchering, women rendering lard and packing sausage, and kids hauling wood for the fire.

What happened as the pigs were butchered?

In a time when nutrition could be hard to come by, nothing went to waste, and each cut got sorted into “keep for later” or “eat it now.” The loin, ribs, and organ meats that couldn’t be preserved by salting or brining got cooked and eaten in the days right after butchering, making hog killing time also feasting time.

The snouts, feet, and other odd cuts went into a pickling brine to last the winter, trimmings got made into sausages to ensure nothing went to waste, but the prize cuts, the hams, shoulders, and bellies, were headed for the salt.

What do you mean “headed for the salt”?

Literally, just what I said, the hams (rear leg of a pig), shoulders (front leg of a pig), and bellies (bacon before it’s cured & smoked), all got rubbed down with copious amounts of salt and then left to sit and cure. This process of sitting in salt would render them safe to eat and spoilage free for months.

Until modern food science, farmers weren’t exactly sure why this process worked, but now we do. Here’s the science: Spoilage is caused by bacteria, and bacteria need water to live. When you pack meat in salt, the salt pulls moisture out through osmosis and lowers what food scientists call "water activity," basically the amount of free water available for microbes to grow in. No water, no bacteria, no spoilage.

In addition to the seasonings like black pepper that were often added to the salt, there was also a hidden helper nobody knew about. The natural salts people used for curing often contained traces of nitrate, which breaks down in the meat and does two things: it blocks dangerous bacteria, including the one that causes botulism, and it bonds with the pork muscle pigment to create that rosy pink color we still associate with ham and bacon today.

After the salt cure, smoke was added. The meat was hung in the smokehouse over a low, smoldering fire for days of slow smoking. That smoke wasn’t just adding flavor; it was also depositing natural antimicrobial compounds on the surface of the meat and drying the outside even further, adding another layer of protection on top of the salt.

So what was the smokehouse itself like?

Picture that little building from the top of the story. Most farm smokehouses were small, maybe ten feet on a side, built of logs or rough planks with a steep roof and a packed dirt floor. No windows, and usually no chimney. This slightly claustrophobic design was purposeful: a smokehouse needed to be dark, snug, and nearly airtight so the smoke would fill the room and hang there long enough to soak into the meat rather than drift into the atmosphere. Tight walls and a good door also kept out flies, rodents, and other four-legged and two-legged would-be freeloaders.

Building the building required attention to detail, but building the fire was the real tricky part. A smokehouse fire shouldn’t be a roaring blaze, because a hot fire would cook the meat, and cooked meat spoils. No, what you wanted was a low, smoldering fire, built right on the dirt floor or set in an old iron pot, fed with hardwood like oak, hickory, or fallen fruitwood. Green, unseasoned wood was preferred to throw off the maximum amount of smoke, and sometimes even corncobs were used. Basically, everything that’s the opposite of what the Boy Scouts teach to build a fire is what you should do to build a smokehouse fire!

Once the smoking was done, the meat didn’t go anywhere. It kept right on hanging from the rafters, wrapped in cloth to keep out insects. When the family wanted a ham, somebody walked out to the smokehouse, cut one down, scraped off the smoky outer rind, and soaked the salt out of it before cooking.

The result was a building full of meat that could hang safely for months, sometimes years. Think of the smokehouse as the chest freezer of its day, except it ran on salt and wood instead of electricity, and it fed the family from one hog killing to the next.

Was it just ham coming out of the smokehouse or were there other products too?

More than just ham – three things would come out from the smokehouse, all from the same hog and the same salt. The rear leg became ham. The belly, once it took the salt and the smoke, became bacon. The front shoulder got the same treatment and became a cheaper, ham-like cut you’ll still see sold today as a picnic shoulder or cottage bacon. Same animal, same process, three different cuts of preserved pork.

But the real workhorse of the old farm wasn’t any of those smoked cuts, it was salt pork.

Salt pork is fatty belly or back fat packed in nothing but salt, no smoke, cured hard and stored in barrels. It is saltier and fattier than bacon, and it was cheap, filling, and nearly indestructible. You didn’t fry up a holiday ham on a Tuesday in February. You pulled a hunk of salt pork out of the barrel, soaked some of the salt back out of it, and fried it, or you dropped it into a pot of beans or greens to make a plain meal taste like something. It lasted just about forever and traveled well, which is why it fed sailors, soldiers, and pioneers for centuries.

This is some real Laura Ingalls Wilder stuff, isn’t it? Tell me more about how these farmers lived!

I’m glad you think so too – I love those books! Let’s pretend it’s 1850 and you farm a piece of land in Wisconsin, or Kentucky, or anywhere in rural America. You keep a dozen or so hogs and let them fatten all summer and fall on your corn and whatever they can root up in the woods.

The first hard frost comes in November. Your neighbors show up at your place, you show up at theirs, and over a few long, cold, busy days, you turn those hogs into a winter’s worth of food. You feast first, because the ribs, the loin, and the organ meat won’t keep, so for a few days right after the killing you eat like kings.

Then comes the real work. The hams and shoulders and bellies go into the salt. The fat gets rendered down into a crock of lard. The trimmings get ground and stuffed into sausage. The fatty belly gets packed into barrels as salt pork.

You’ve just got done working hard putting the pork down, and here comes winter, and now you need to make the pork last until spring. You don’t eat ham every night. The hams are your treasure, saved for special occasions – maybe a holiday, a family visit, or the local preacher staying the night with you.

Day to day, you eat salt pork. Fried salt pork and a biscuit for breakfast. Salt pork simmered into a pot of beans for supper. Salt pork flavoring whatever root vegetables are still down in the cellar. It is salty, it is fatty, it keeps you alive, and by February, you never want to see another piece of pork again in your life.

You sell or trade a little along the way, too. A ham or a barrel of salt pork goes to town in exchange for the things you can’t grow yourself: coffee, sugar, cloth, and more salt to cure next year’s hogs.

And then, finally, spring. The hens start laying again. The first green things push up out of the ground, and a mess of fresh dandelion greens that today we’d eradicate with herbicide tastes like a miracle after a winter of salt and starch.

 A fresh egg, a spring chicken, anything that didn’t come out of the salt barrel, feels like a holiday. That rhythm, fat in the fall, lean and salty by late winter, green and alive again come spring, was simply what life tasted like for most Americans for a good chunk of our history.

Wow – was this cycle and the process of curing pork to get through the winter an American invention?

Nope - humans have been salting pork legs for at least a couple thousand years. Records of Italian prosciutto-making go back to Roman times, and the word prosciutto comes from a verb meaning "to dry thoroughly".

Spain's jamón serrano translates to "mountain ham" and has been made in the Spanish highlands for something like two thousand years. The legendary jamón ibérico comes from black-footed Iberian pigs that fatten on acorns in the oak forests of southwestern Spain. France has jambon de Bayonne. Germany has its Westphalian and Black Forest hams. China has Jinhua ham, cured with the hoof still on it. Pretty much anywhere pigs and salt existed together, somebody figured out the same trick.

Nearly all of those Old World classics are what we today call dry-cured hams: rubbed with salt, hung up, and left alone for months while they slowly lose moisture and concentrate flavor. A dry-cured ham can lose somewhere between 18 and 30 percent of its weight by the time it's done.

America’s signature addition to the ham game was smoke. The great European hams are mostly unsmoked, cured in mountain air. The American classics took the same salt cure and added hickory, oak, and applewood. Our hams have the signature taste of the smokehouse, and it’s a taste that I love.

The classic European hams are the family tree American country ham belongs to, but the ham most Americans actually eat today is the other kind: wet-cured ham.

Also known as the "city ham" these are the hams you’ll find in the supermarket cooler, at the deli for slicing, or as a spiral-sliced Easter ham. These hams are soaked in or injected with a salt-based brine, then cooked, usually in an industrial smokehouse, thereby achieving the same result as dry curing but in days rather than months. It's juicy, mild, and affordable, and we'll get to how it took over in a bit.

What type of hams does Lake Geneva Country Meats make? You’re out in the country, but your hams don’t seem like country hams.

Award-winning ones, thank you very much for asking!

Seriously, though, we make wet-cured hams of both the bone-in and boneless varieties. Bone-in hams are made from the rear leg of a pig, with the foot and skin removed, while boneless hams are made from pressing two muscles (called ham insides) together until they stick.

Each piece of meat goes into a cure that has water, salt, brown sugar, sodium erythorbate, and sodium nitrite. The salt and brown sugar add flavor, while the salt, sodium erythorbate, and sodium nitrite inhibit the growth of pathogens and spoilage bacteria. The water is absorbed into the ham, and when we cook it, we cook out all the added water, leaving behind a ready-to-eat, super-flavorful product.

Back to the story, how did we go from making a couple of hams in farmers’ smokehouses to ham being big business?

As America industrialized, we went from the farms on the South and East Coast being the center of American ham to the meat packers of the Midwest running the show.

Cincinnati sat on the Ohio River surrounded by corn and hog country, and as early as 1818, its packers were salting pork into brine-filled barrels for shipment. By 1850, it was the leading pork-processing center in the country, possibly the world, and the sixth-largest city in America, a boomtown built on barreled salt pork. Its nickname was "Porkopolis," and pigs reportedly wandered the downtown streets like they owned the place. Porkopolis might be my favorite thing I learned researching this one, and I just had to share it.

Salt pork from those barrels fed sailors, soldiers, and settlers. It was the protein that crossed the plains in covered wagons and filled the rations of both armies in the Civil War. For a huge stretch of American history, when somebody said "meat," the default assumption was preserved pork.

Cincinnati’s reign didn’t last. As railways replaced the river network, Chicago took over as the center of American meatpacking, and Cincinnati lost the Porkopolis crown.

Meat production is hard work that is most efficiently done on a large scale. And as refrigerated railcars made it possible to process many hogs in one place, like Chicago, and then send out the finished products all around the country, the need for one big harvest day on the farm faded.

With the advent of home refrigerators in the 20^th century, keeping meat safe no longer required salt and smoke. Just going to the grocery store and then keeping the products in your refrigerator.

Hog killing day faded away, and those windowless buildings on the farm stopped being smokehouses and started being storage sheds.

Today, American farmers market more than 112 million hogs a year, and the country produced about 27.8 billion pounds of pork in 2024. Most of the ham in that river of pork is the wet-cured city ham, brined and cooked in days, not the country ham that takes months to produce.

That scale is hard to picture. Pork is a high-tech business now. Most hogs are raised in big, climate-controlled barns instead of rooting around in the woods, and the United States is one of the three largest pork producers on the planet, behind only China and the combined countries of the European Union.

Ham has become an affordable, tasty, and reliable staple for many people, as well as a holiday treat that families enjoy together. It’s a long way from a windowless building behind the farmhouse, but we can all be thankful that ham is now something most of us can afford to put on the table just about any week we please!

But what if I still want to taste that old-school country ham? Am I stuck with city hams?

Fear not, big industry didn’t knock out all the country ham traditions.

Virginia is still turning out quality country hams, with places like Edwards Virginia Smokehouse in Surry keeping the tradition alive. Fun fact: Edwards recently sponsored the restoration of the smokehouses at George Washington’s Mount Vernon estate.

Back in the day, it wasn’t just George Washington who was famous; his smokehouses were famous as well. Mount Vernon hams were quite the prize in their day, and in fact, in 1786, he shipped a whole barrel across the Atlantic to his old friend the Marquis de Lafayette. (Yes, that Lafayette, America’s favorite fighting Frenchman, for the Hamilton fans in the crowd.)

Today, when you visit Mount Vernon, you can see Colonial-era meat processing and preservation in action. It’s pretty neat! A virtual tour is also available if you’d like to see it without the trip!

The dry-cure tradition runs through the South with Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Kentucky making up a “ham belt” where the climate is ideal for naturally curing meat, with winter temperature swings allowing for the traditional salting process to do its thing. There are hundreds of small producers with their own secret recipes or techniques, and they’re all fun to try. If you have a favorite producer, drop a link in the comments so we can all check it out.

This production stuff is interesting, but I’m mostly interested in eating. How did ham become so popular in lunches?

When ham took months to produce, it was special-occasion food, the treasure you saved for company. But as the industrial machine that built Porkopolis kept getting bigger and faster, the meat packing industry learned how to produce a cheap, flavorful wet-cured ham that could be mass distributed using new refrigeration technologies. What had been a treat became an everyday protein that a working family could actually afford.

Then, in 1928, a jeweler-turned-inventor named Otto Rohwedder solved the other half of the equation. In Chillicothe, Missouri, a bakery used his new machine to sell the first loaves of pre-sliced bread. I know it sounds crazy, but this was a huge innovation in the bakery world!

Suddenly, anybody could throw together a sandwich in about ten seconds. Pair that with the rise of German immigrant delicatessens offering cold cuts for people to take home and enjoy, then the explosion of grocery stores and their deli counters, and the ham sandwich soon became a standard American lunch. It was affordable, fast to make, portable, and tasted darn good.

It was the meal in the lunch pail. When the Industrial Revolution moved work out of the home and into the factory, lunch went with it, packed cold into a tin bucket: a ham sandwich, a piece of fruit, maybe a pickle, and coffee in a thermos. It was also the star of the summer picnic, for one simple reason that ties this whole story together. A cured ham doesn’t need refrigeration. The very thing that let salt-and-smoke ham survive a winter hanging in the smokehouse is what let it ride along to the lake in a basket on a hot July afternoon.

And how did ham become the holiday centerpiece?

There are “classic” stories about why ham is the centerpiece for Christmas and Easter, but like so many stories we tell ourselves about food, the truth doesn’t really hold up.

Let’s start with Easter. The story you’ll usually hear is that farmers slaughtered hogs in the fall, cured the hams through the winter, and those hams came ready right around Easter, so that’s what ended up on the table. It’s a tidy story, and the fall-slaughter part is true, but it doesn’t quite hold up, because a properly cured country ham keeps for a year or more. It wasn’t as if ham was only ready in April.

The more honest answer is just economics. Most of the world serves lamb at Easter, a tradition that traces back to Passover, but Americans have always had far more pigs than sheep, and ham was cheaper. After World War II, the American sheep flock collapsed (servicemembers who were fed mutton overseas many hated it!), and today the average American eats less than a pound of lamb a year, against roughly fifty pounds of pork. Ham won by default.

Christmas is an even better story. A lot of people, me included, assumed the Christmas ham was some ancient tradition, maybe descended from those medieval roast boar feasts you see in old paintings. Those traditions are real. They are also not where your spiral ham comes from. For most of American history, the Christmas meat was turkey. As recently as 1940, “Christmas turkey” showed up in print about thirteen times as often as “Christmas ham.”

So what happened?

Marketing, of course. Once the big packers perfected those mild, sweet, easy hams in the early 1900s, they went looking for occasions to sell more of them. In 1916, the Armour company ran an ad pitching its ham as the perfect “holiday ham” for the Christmas season. The sweet, clove-studded, diamond-scored glaze we all picture now came together around the same era. The Christmas ham isn’t a continuation of medieval traditions…. it’s a hundred-year-old American sales pitch that happened to work spectacularly well.

And the spiral-sliced ham, the king of the modern holiday table? We can thank one man for that. A Detroit meat salesman named Harry Hoenselaar patented a machine that cut a whole ham into one continuous spiral right down to the bone, and in 1957, he opened the first HoneyBaked Ham store. That one invention was such a hit that spiral-cut hams now account for about a third of all ham sold in America. Not bad for a guy with a homemade slicer.

Let’s bring home the bacon.

Finally got a pun into this one!!

I love the story of ham and how what was once a preservation technique to keep meat safe throughout the winter, so farm families could have enough to eat, has turned into something that we just take for granted.

Through the miracle of modern food science, we’ve taken a months-long process and turned it into something that takes mere days.

Where salt & smoke were once a necessary, if not entirely understood, food-safety step, they’ve now become a flavor that we cherish as part of our holiday traditions and weekday lunches alike.

We should never take ham for granted. Long live ham!

Thanks for reading this one – I hope you enjoyed the story as much as I did. Stop by Lake Geneva Country Meats (or your local butcher shop) and pick up some ham to enjoy. And that ham sandwich I told you to make back at the start? Since it’s summer, take it on a picnic.

Sounds lovely to me.

We’ll talk next week when we dive into another American food story – hot dogs and hamburgers!

Great Books to Read If You'd Like to Learn More:

• Hog Meat & Hoecake: Food Supply in the Old South 1840 - 1860 by Sam Bowers Hillard

• Putting Meat on the American Table: Taste, Technology, Transformation by Roger Horowitz

• Salt: A World History by Mark Kurlansky
• Three Squares: The Invention of the American Meal by Abigail Carroll

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