Since we always celebrate Passover with Andrea's family, Easter is kind of hit and miss and this year's little celebration was totally serendipitous. I no longer subscribe to the Post but someone left a copy behind Wednesday when I was at Starbucks so I brought home the Food section, which had this recipe. Then by coincidence I was shopping at Whole Foods for Thursday dinner and they had several nice-looking fresh hams in the meat case. So I got one, planning to cook it for the two of us and eating leftovers for a couple of months. But we ran into friends on Saturday who had made no other plans for Easter, so they said they'd join us and we turned it into a full-fledged Easter dinner.
I'm not sure I've ever eaten fresh ham before and fairly certain I've never cooked it. This was simple and tasty and gave us a, well, fresh perspective on ham. It is neither cured nor smoked, so probably closer to pork roast than what we think of as ham. It is, however, the cut that is used to make ham -- the rear leg. The Post headnote says there is the meatier butt portion, from higher up on the leg, or the lower shank portion. WF labeled their cut "sirloin," so either I was looking at the wrong sign or they goofed. This was clearly the butt portion and weighed in at 7-1/2 lbs (the recipe calls for 10 lbs but they must use bigger pigs). It had a lovely layer of white fat around the top half and was tied with just two strings.
One or two days beforehand, you make a crisscross pattern in the fat (I removed the string and re-tied afterwards), rub salt and pepper (4 tsp salt and 2 tsp freshly ground pepper) over the whole ham, then mix up a rub of 2 Tbl olive oil, 1 Tbl chopped rosemary, and 3 chopped garlic cloves and rub that over the whole ham. Put in a big Ziploc bag and refrigerate, taking it out 45 min. before roasting.
To roast, you preheat the oven to 450 degrees, put the ham in a large roasting pan, and cook for 20 min., until browned, and then turn oven down to 325. Rotate the ham front to back once or twice and cook for 2-1/2 to 3 hrs, reaching an internal temperature of 150 degrees. During the last 2 hrs of cooking, apply a glaze made of 1/2 c. honey, 1/2 c. whole-grain mustard (I used Dijon), 1 Tbl white wine vinegar and 1 tsp chopped rosemary. The ham develops a lovely dark crust. I pulled it out after about 2-3/4 hrs when temperature was reached and just let it sit for an hour so with a fold of aluminum foil over it. It was still just a bit warm when I carved and sliced and tasted really excellent that way. You put some more whole-grain mustard on the table.
We found the recipes for the sides online and they were the perfect foils in their classic simplicity for this fresh ham. We also baked some drop buttermilk biscuits and had some of Andrea's super-duper dark chocolate macaroons for dessert. A very smooth and mellow Malbec was a great accompaniment.
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