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COUNTRY BAKED HAM

8 lb ham                                               3 quarts sweet cider

2 cups raisins                                        2 cup brown sugar

1 tsp honey                                           2 tsp dry mustard

1 1/4 tsp powdered cloves                    ½ cup water

Simmer ham in cider for about 2 hrs.  Drain and skin ham.  Cover it with brown sugar, honey, mustard, cloves and water mixture.  Place in baking pan, pour cider from simmered ham over it and add raisins.  Bake 2 ½ hrs at 325 degrees.  Baste often.  Use cider raisin drippings as gravy.

 Serves 8

Comment:

Well, this was a problem.  Karen was right on time with her recipe for this month, and I kept diddling along trying to figure out what to have with it.  Ham always seems to give me problems when I need to pick a wine.

The wine was obviously going to need to stand up to the sweetness of that sauce: sweet cider, brown sugar, honey and raisins.  The mustard and cloves were not going to tone that down much.

After some finger-drumming, I drew a blank.  The only wine I have had recently with ham and actually liked was an Apple Wine from a Pennsylvania winery, and somehow I didn't think that would be right with this sauce.  (Besides, I checked under the basement stairs and we were all out of that one.)

So I cheated a bit.  I went out on the Internet and searched to see what other people might be recommending.  This only led to more confusion, since it seems recommendations for which wine went with ham were all over the lot.  I did get some satisfaction from discovering other people who said that ham was always a problem.

The Wine Spectator site had what I considered a good list.  The only problem was that it seemed heavily concentrated on foreign wines (white Bordeaux and white Burgundy, Fino Sherry, Beaujolais, Rioja, Chianti, etc.)  I wanted an American wine, because we are a site that concentrates on American wineries.  So I looked to see how my cellar (the racks under my basement stairs) matched up with their American selections.

More problems.  We are at the end of our Winter attempt to create room in the wine rack so we won't feel guilty as we hit the wine trails of Spring and buy too much wine once again.  Pickings in the cellar were slim in the categories I was drifting towards: Sauvignon Blanc, Chardonnay, Gewurtztraminer, and Pinot Noir.

We've had a wine around here that I could see with this meal: Taft Street's 2001 Sauvignon Blanc from California, a wonderful, bargain-priced wine.  I began to perk up.  Here was a theme.  In a tough economy, everyone likes a bargain.  What else did I have that fit the bill?

There weren't any Gewurtztraminers under the stairs, but there was some Traminette (a hybrid grape from New York State, descended from the Gewurtztraminer and Seyval, now becoming popular in Pennsylvania and Virginia.)  Karen likes it more than I do, but I could see it with this meal: the Vynecrest 2001 Traminette, a wine with a mouthful of flavor and a slightly spicy finish.

If we needed a bargain Chardonnay, I had the perfect one: "Two Buck Chuck", the Charles F. Shaw Chardonnay that is creating such a stir.  (Actually, it is "Three Buck Chuck" here in New Jersey, but the wine is still a bargain at that price.)

Moving on to reds, I paused for a minute.  Wine Spectator liked Dolcetto, but you won't find that at American wineries unless you have a little old Italian winemaker nearby (we do, at Demarest Hill).  A Long Island Pinot Noir might have done the job, but I was now looking for bargains, and that left them out.  So I looked further under the stairs and came upon a wine from Virginia.

This was Rappahannock Red, which we tasted at Hartwood Winery just a few days ago.  This wine is light and fruity, made in a Beaujolais style and designed to be drunk while young.  I think that's what we'll have.

Enjoy!

 Last modified: August 07, 2007