We just got back from visiting Mark’s parents in the rural area northwest of Cincinnati. Just before we left, an acquaintance of my father-in-law dropped off a Christmas present. Dad carried the silvered-plastic insulated bag in from the porch. "He said it’s a Virginia ham."
"Ooh, what a nice present!" I said. (He knows I wear my appetite on my sleeve.) "That’s a treat. They don’t have those in Minnesota. At least I’ve never seen one sold up there."
"You want it? I don’t care for that salt-cured kind."
I agreed enthusiastically. It went, still wrapped, into our cooler along with a frozen package of Mark’s grandma’s homemade goetta. We drove all day and threw the ham into the fridge and the still-frozen goetta into the freezer when we got home.
Sunday night I thought I’d fry up slices of the ham for dinner, along with baked squash and collard greens and sauteed apples, and we’d wash it all down with a couple of cold beers. But when I picked up the package I found it surprisingly light and, um, squishy.
Upon opening the silvered bag I called out to Mark, "Hey, who was it that gave this ham to your dad again?"
Mark named the gift-giver, somebody from Dad’s neighborhood whom I hadn’t ever met. "Why?"
"Tell me about him."
"Um. He’s not the sharpest tack in the barrel. Why?"
I showed him the contents of the pouch: a four-pound log of boned, chopped, cooked, pressed, flavoring-solution-injected, pre-sliced, pale pink lunch meat, heat-sealed in plastic. Brownish speckles, no doubt intended to signify "spice," floated in the liquid in the package, which was graced with a shiny gold sticker bearing the prominent label, "VIRGINIA BRAND delicatessen-style ham."
And me with only ten minutes or so before the squash was done! After some discussion of the evidence for the refrigeration history of the ham log (the gift giver had called ahead and announced he was dropping off a "perishable" gift, and had gone to the trouble of wrapping it in an insulated bag, and the frozen stuff in the cooler had stayed frozen), we carefully and thoroughly fried up some of it for dinner anyway, ate about four bites each, and then, I’m sorry to say, threw the rest of it out.
We did enjoy those cold beers…
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