Cured and Smoked Herdwick Mutton

There has always been a rich tradition of curing and smoking sheep meat wherever flocks of sheep were kept. The same applies to flocks of goats.  Cured meats are the old fashioned version of a fridge - keeping protein wholesome and long lasting.

Mature Herdwick wether, are castrated male sheep which were kept to an older age. They have a deeper flavour, a dark, tight, grained texture to the meat and were sometimes used to cure. 

They give a bigger leg than a ewe (a mature lambing female) and one of the things about curing is that older animals have a more appropriate ph for curing. The older legs cure more successfully and have a much more complex flavour profile (which is one of the reasons why the best Prosciutto’s are made from older animals).

It’s normally assumed that this product was produced in times gone by in the “continental way” of producing air-dried fancy salami, but this is a wrong assumption.

Cumbrian cured mutton isn’t produced this way and one of the reasons for there not being an established tradition in the UK of Italian style salami curing is the good old British weather and there is nowhere better to understand this than in Cumbria - it never rains in Cumbria (honestly, if you ask the millions of visitors we get to the lakes you will get probably get different comments about the weather). ;-)

The high humidity does mean that there isn’t the possibility of making any air-dried product that would be safe to eat. However, in this day and age there is an ever growing group of artisan salami producers and wholesalers who do quite nicely with a little technological help.

The cured mutton is to be cooked as you would do your ham and eggs for breakfast or for dinner at night. To add additional shelf life to the cured leg (and I guess extra flavour), it is (was) smoked, not in a purpose-built smoke house but in a smoke box built in to the back of the chimney. These disused stone smoke boxes can be found in many old farmhouses all over the lake district.

These Herdwick hams are not the mild flavoured gammon ham we have become accustomed to today, and as with all the things that aren’t mild or insipid it is an acquired taste. In my opinion though, it’s an amazing one. In the past, there also wouldn’t have been the consistency of product expected by the modern consumer, but maybe, just maybe that is part of the hams’ charm.