The word ham originally meant the crook of the knee
In Old English, ham was the hollow behind the knee, from a Germanic root meaning crooked. Only around the fifteenth century did it come to mean a pig's cured hind leg. The food is far older: Etruscans were curing pork legs in the sixth century BC, and Cato wrote instructions around 160 BC.
Ham is pork from the leg preserved by curing, sometimes followed by smoking. Its origins are argued over. Some claim the Chinese described it first, the reference Larousse Gastronomique favours Gaul, and the Roman writer Varro mentions hams being imported from Gaul, so the trade was clearly established by Roman times.
Dry curing means packing the meat in salt and pressing out moisture, then hanging it somewhere dark and temperature-controlled to dry and air. It is slow. Jinhua ham takes about 8 to 10 months, jamón serrano 9 to 12, prosciutto di Parma over a year, and Iberian ham up to two years. Much of the flavour comes from enzymes breaking muscle proteins into small peptides and free amino acids while fat splits into fatty acids; salt holds that activity in check. Most modern dry cures add nitrites, which stop bacteria and turn the meat a deep red, although nitrites can form carcinogenic nitrosamines, especially when cooked, and some places cap the amount allowed.
Wet curing soaks the meat in brine, often sweetened, for about 3 to 14 days, or injects the solution directly, which is faster and spreads salt more evenly. It also plumps the product, adding roughly 4 percent to its weight. Italian prosciutto cotto is brined and then cooked. Smoking adds another layer: burning wood breaks down lignin into guaiacol and related compounds that give smoked ham its characteristic taste.
Law polices the word closely. US federal rules reserve plain ham for the hind legs of pigs, a hickory-smoked ham must be smoked with hickory alone, and honey-cured requires honey to make up at least half the sweetener. In Britain, cured leg that still needs cooking is called gammon and becomes ham once cooked. The International Agency for Research on Cancer classes processed meats such as ham as a cause of cancer.
Source: Ham
