Slow Cooked Yorkshire Ham

When I arrived in Yorkshire earlier this month, we were greeted by an unusually warm, settled and balmy stretch of weather. The gift this weather gave us was being able to spend all of our time in my parents’ garden, admiring the view of the Yorkshire Moors while eating our evening meals al fresco.

Before our trip, I planned to cook a Yorkshire Ham in the slow cooker I gave mum earlier in the year. She sourced a 5 lb piece of ham from a local award winning butcher David Lishman, who in turn had sourced it from a small pig farm some 10 miles away.

So before heading out on a steam train adventure to follow the journey of The Railway Children, a children’s classic written and set in the early 20th Century, I prepared the pork and left it to cook in the slow cooker for 8 hours. While we soaked up the countryside of my childhood the pork was bubbling away in cider and ready on our return.

Ingredients

5 lb piece of gammon (uncooked, cured hind leg of pork)
1 onion, halved
8 cloves
1 rib celery, halved
1 carrot, halved
1 tsp juniper berries * optional
8 black peppercorns
1 1/2 pints hard cider

Stud the onion halves with the cloves and put into the bottom of your slow cooker with the celery, carrot, juniper berries and black peppercorns.

Place the gammon on top of the vegetables in the slow cooker.

Pour the hard cider over the gammon, cover and cook on LOW for 8-10 hours.

Once cooked, we refer to the gammon as ham!

Remove the ham and slice horizontally using a sharp carving knife and a large fork. We serve it as cold cuts with English Mustard alongside boiled new potatoes and fresh fava beans. At Christmas, we glaze the ham in the oven with honey and mustard.

Zen Moment

“Growing apart doesn’t change the fact that for a long time we grew side by side; our roots will always be tangled. I’m glad for that.”
― Ally Condie, Matched