The Hungry Poet: My Life in Food — A Baked Ham with John Keats

Subscribe to Andrew's weekly newsletter here for all of his latest news and writing.

John Keats with a Baked Ham (AI generated image... in case you were in doubt)

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:

Its loveliness increases; it will never

Pass into nothingness; but still will keep

A bower quiet for us, and a sleep

Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.

from 'Endymion' by John Keats

Was John Keats really thinking of a baked ham when he wrote Endymion? If we replace ‘thing of beauty’ with ‘baked ham’ the poem still works; try it and see for yourself. Indeed the replacement might even improve it, because a baked ham really is a joy forever and its loveliness does only increase in the days after it's been made. And I should know as I’ve made many in my time. In fact, the case starts to build when we look at some of his other poems: ‘Baked ham, would I were stedfast as thou art...’, ‘Ode on a Baked Ham’, ‘On First Nibbling Chapman’s Baked Ham’, ‘La Belle Sans Baked Ham’? Or should it be ‘La Baked Ham Sans Merci’? 

I’ve always had a soft spot for a baked ham. It started with Christmas day. We'd always have turkey and ham on our plates for the Christmas dinner. It was only later in life when I mentioned this to people that they were amazed that I would have had both on the same day, hot, and not just for sandwiches on Christmas night for example. So, the baked ham, you could say, was baked into my palette from a young age. My favourite thing about the baked ham was how, after carving, there would always be a diaspora of crumbly bits left on the plate, and somehow walking past and scooping these up with fingers always gave a salty dopamine hit.

Living on my own in Bristol was the start, really, of learning to teach myself how to cook because, well, nobody else was going to do it for me. In addition, with a couple of years of teaching experience under my belt, I no longer needed to work every single night planning lessons and therefore had a bit more time to cook. 

Then came a time when I was invited to a Christmas party where everyone was asked to bring a dish. After initially wondering whether I could pull it off, I ended up buying ham from the nearby Sainsbury’s and cooking it myself. I followed the Nigella Lawson recipe whereby she cooks it in about two litres of coca-cola in a large pot, and then glazes it with a reduced mixture of light brown sugar and more coca-cola. The result is this glistening black lump of ham, studded with cloves, which contrasted, beautifully when sliced, with the bright pink interior. I took it along, with a great deal of trepidation, and looked over people’s shoulders all night to see whether they were eating it or not. To my amazement they did, and it had gone by the end of the evening. 

Walking home that night, I remember thinking (despite the wine): so this is how it feels to cook something that lots of people like to eat. It’s a feeling that has stayed with me, and to this day I’m always looking for these recipes which please a critical mass of people. Some other foods I would class in that bracket would be focaccia (people love soft, oily, salty bread), homemade sausage rolls (everybody loves a sausage roll - turn your back and they will have gone – you can never quite make enough), homemade hummus under a little puddle of extra virgin olive oil with crudites, and parmesan biscuits (Simon Hopkinson’s recipe is the bomb) — I’ll stop here but I could go on. 

On top of all of this, baking a ham is one of the most economically sensible things you can do. At the supermarket, you have to pay £4.50 for 200 grams of Finest Wiltshire Finely Sliced Ham (10 slices). A 1500g ham, on the other hand, costs approximately £10, and, after being cooked, lasts in our house for about three weeks, and goes into pies, countless sandwiches and pasta dishes. You do the maths, but I must get packets and packets of ham out of the joint I buy. The other thing about buying and cooking your own, is that you get to slice it however finely or thickly as you like. I like to try and slice it so finely that I can see the daylight coming through its grain. One of the pleasures of cooking a ham is in the fine slicing of it. 

If you’ll allow me a Proustian diversion for a second, this wafer thin ham takes me back to childhood and Saturday afternoons, when my mother would come home from work at the Post Office at about one o’clock in the afternoon. The Post Office shut for a half day on Saturdays in those days and she would bring with her a loaf of bread in a white paper bag with ‘Cuisine de France’ written on it (the irony is this company is based entirely in Ireland and seemingly traded off the idea of the authenticity of French bread), Cracker Barrel cheese, tomatoes and coleslaw. We called the bread ‘crusty’ which just meant a crusty loaf, which spoke volumes about how conditioned we were to accept the soft, processed, Chorleywood method of bread as our default the rest of the week. Crusty had a crust (well I never!) and this was a luxury for us; imagine that, bread with a crust being a luxury. Nowadays I only eat bread with a crust, in fact it’s one the key attributes I look for in a loaf of bread, but back then soft, processed bread was our staple, as it would have been, and I’m sure still is for many, many households. 

But, I loved the crusty bread: the texture; the shape of it; the look of it on the chopping board in the middle of the table. And I used to look forward to those Saturday afternoon lunches, not least because you could cut bits off of the bread yourself and decide for yourself how you wanted to top the bread whether it was coleslaw first and then ham, or the other way round. It just seemed a different way of eating to our normal weekday food. 

All of this food was bought in The Spar on the Downpatrick Road which my mother would stop at on the way home from leaving my aunty home after work. The ham had to be ordered at the ‘Deli counter’ where someone would slice the ham in front of you, place it on cellophane and then place that in a little white paper bag, which was folded over and fastened with a printed label which stated: name of ham (usually breaded Wicklow ham), weight and price. Walk into a Spar now and everything’s prepacked and pumped full of slimy preservatives, which give the ham a sickening, plumped-up chewiness. The Wicklow ham I remember, and it may well be through rose tinted spectacles, was pleasingly dry, and thin, and you had to stop yourself from eating more than your fair share, especially with my four siblings and two parents to go round. 

Now, I make my own crusty bread – usually I’ll treat the family to freshly baked baguettes on Saturdays – and bake my own ham, even if I confess to buying in the nice coleslaw from the supermarket and the vine ripened tomatoes. It’s still a dish I love though, as it transports me back to those Saturday afternoons, where I was without a care in the world, and would spend the best part of the rest of the afternoon watching the WCW wrestling on ITV, and maybe some of Des Lynam’s Grandstand, if I was really bored. 

As strange as it may sound, baking a ham for me is a way of reconnecting with the past and my family, despite the fact I now live in a different country, and despite the fact that my siblings now all live very busy family lives of their own. It’s a way of remembering those carefree Saturday afternoons, and standing by the window in the living room, waiting for my mother’s car to come hurtling up the drive, bringing those white paper bags. 

So, okay, maybe Keats wasn’t referring to a baked ham in his poems, but for me there’s no denying either its steadfastness or beauty.