Somewhere between the tide line and the smokehouse.
Curing meat has been on the list for a long time. Something always got in the way — work, weather, the reasonable objections of reasonable people.
This is the year it stops being a someday thing. A ham house near the water, air that already tastes like salt, and enough patience to let a leg of pork take its time. Nothing about this process is fast, and that's most of the appeal.
We're not pretending to be experts. We're learning the way everyone learns this: reading too much, weighing everything twice, and being honest when a batch doesn't go the way it should. If you care about that kind of thing, you're exactly who this is for.
We grew up on a strip of dirt between the Chesapeake Bay and the Patuxent River, but we were usually too busy working on the farm to take advantage of it. We eventually fell in love with hunting, fishing, crabbing and eating, and as life advanced we got to explore each of these chapters in more depth — from tying our own snoods for a homemade trotline to learning how to smoke meat during COVID.
Each experience was a chance to not only learn and enjoy, but to give perspective to the way things used to be. The smokehouse outside of grandmom's back door — right in the shade of Bessie — always held an allure to me.
This page is one of the first steps on this chapter. It's fun to do research, but there's a big difference between talking about doing something and doing something. So HamCam launches (with no ham and no cam) as we're finalizing the supply list to make our first bacon.
The slow part
Salt goes on. Weeks pass. Weight drops. The only real skill is noticing — humidity, airflow, the smell of the room on a damp morning. Coastal air is either the best thing that could happen to a ham house or a genuinely terrible idea. We intend to find out publicly.
- Salt
- The only ingredient that argues back
- Air
- Off the water, most days
- Time
- Measured in months
Pull up a chair
There's a porch, there's a view, and there's usually something hanging in the dark a few steps away. The camera goes up soon. The playlist is already running.