Couple continues tradition of smoking, curing hams

By MICHEL ELBEN
Staff Reporter

MONKTON, Md. — Ross Smith usually picks damp, foggy days to get started on his family’s popular smoked hams.
“It’s a lost art,” said wife Jeanette Smith, who prepares the family sugar cure recipe. The Smiths’ dairy farm, My Lady’s Manor, has been in the family since the late 1800s.
The farm include plenty of pasture, beautiful gardens and a smokehouse that has become an institution over generations.
“My dad always smoked meat,” said Smith. “I always wanted to learn and finally, he taught me.”
Smith said his family used to raise hogs but stopped a few years after he got married.
“That was about 50 years ago,” he said, laughing.
They now procure the meat from Groff’s in Elizabethtown, Pa.
The Smiths will exhibit their cured and smoked hams on Aug. 23 and 24 at the Maryland State Fair.
They plan to make bacon out of the hams after they exhibit and “hopefully win,” said Smith.
Smith said his wife no longer allows him to put on the sugar cure. “I made a mess in the kitchen,” he said.
Jeanette laughed at the memory and divulged that the secret to great ham is in the skin.
“You want to have full skin on the back of ham to hold the moisture in, that’s a must,” said Jeanette. “It’s amazing how they shrink.”
“We get raw 20 to 22 pound hams and they lay in a sugar cure for 20 to 30 days,” he Smith.
Smith said the family recipe calls for a sugar cure rub. “The meat is not injected,” he said.
“We hang them up and smoke them for 24 hours four or five times,” Smith added.
The hams hang until fall and are washed with high-pressure washer.
Smith said he prefers hickory smoke to apple smoke because “the smell gets in you.”
To solve that issue, Smith made only one improvement to his family’s smokehouse.
“Dad put a barrel in the middle of the hams and just held his breath — I don’t know how he did it,” said Smith. “I made a stove on the outside and piped it in, then I put an elbow on it and it works 100 percent.”
Smith said that is the only change he has made to his family’s technique.
“My goal is to make them the way my father always did, it’s a tradition,” he said.
The fifth generation of Smiths has started to show interest in using the smokehouse, said Smith.
“We have one son on the farm, our grandsons are starting to get involved,” he said.
The Smiths’ hams went for $500 at their daughter’s silent auction fundraiser.
“I’m sure we could build a business if we wanted to,” said Smith. But for now, the hams are just for family. The Smiths’ are busy enough milking 300 cows.
“Sometimes I still have to ring the dinner bell to get him in,” said Jeanette.