<p>Loveless Cafe in Nashville TN has a great online store. Ham is here: [Country</a> Ham | Smoked Bacon | Country Sausage | Smoked Sausage](<a href=“http://www.hamsandjams.com/category/ham_bacon]Country”>http://www.hamsandjams.com/category/ham_bacon)</p>
<p>They’ve been featured on a biscuit throwdown with Bobby Flay; sadly the biscuit lady Carol Fay passed away earlier this year :(</p>
<p>I have been geeting mine from Edwards at Virginia Traditions for several years. Top stuff and great variety. I was just looking at the cataolg yesterday for my annual Christmas order.</p>
<p>My mother made the best biscuits for ham that I have ever had. She made them small so you could use a small slice of ham and get that perfect ratio of biscuit to ham. We are spoiled so we never liked the canned or frozen store bought biscuits. They are too big and fluffy. I’m thinking that I really need to have her teach me her biscuit making secrets over the holiday or they might not live on to other generations.</p>
<p>I can vouch for the Edwards hams from the site cartera noted above (Virginia Traditions). This is what my family in southern Virginia has been buying for years. It is really salty–it’s an acquired taste.</p>
<p>Cartera, if you want to, share your mom’s biscuit recipe here after the holidays. I have some of my mom’s recipes but not all. My mom died almost 20 years ago.</p>
<p>Alas, finding fresh lima beans anywhere north of Winston-Salem or west of Little Rock is near impossible. Grow some yourself one spring or summer and you will be mighty pleased by their taste.</p>
<p>As for cured country ham, well, I last posted about 2 years ago how I was dumbstruck to discover that these days it’s hard to get salt cured hams in Virginia anywhere but in the southside, near the hog raising counties. I had plenty of experience shopping for ham when I lived not too far from Charlottesville, and even found whole hams on ocassion on visits a bit further north, say in Culpepper. In 2010 a store manager in Fairfax County told me those days are gone. If anything, Virginia supermarkets MAY carry whole country hams during the Christmas season, but have nothing, not even packaged slices, during the rest of the year. Oddly enough, I found a supermarket about 20 miles north of Baltimore during a September car trip, that sold slices. Still have a package or two in the refrigerator.</p>
<p>By the way, I think the “American Proscuitto” marketing attempt is silly. It’s called country ham and they ought to leave it alone.</p>
<p>
We just bought two hams from Edwards–one is a regular country ham, and the other is what they call a “Surryano” ham. We’ve cut that one, and it really is a lot more like prosciutto than it is like a regular country ham.</p>
<p>I bought some real Serrano Ham @Pike Place Market this weekend. Very similar.</p>
<p>Skyhook - I’ll do that. My mom has started to forget some of her recipes that she just made from memory. </p>
<p>LakeWashington - I’m in Baltimore. Which store north of Baltimore had the country ham slices? My mom splurges once a year or so and likes to have a couple of slices and I’d love to take some to her for Christmas.</p>
<p>This thread brings back memories. When I was little, one of my father’s business associates once gave him a whole ham for Christimas. He had to take it somewhere mysterious to have it sliced, and we ate it for months. So good.</p>
<p>I have to share my country ham anecdote. When I was in law school in Boston, a group of students from the South decided to have a holiday party and one of the girls ordered a real country ham. When she took it to a butcher to have it sliced, the butcher told her that it was moldy and was no good. It’s OK, she told him, just slice it. When she came back to get it, he told her that it was so salty that nobody would be able to eat it. Thanks, she told him. And it was delicious.</p>
<p>LOL Hunt.</p>
<p>Whenever we returned from my childhood vacations in Dixie, my parents would bring back a salty, black pepper and mold crusted ham. Dad wasn’t crazy about the saltyness so he would soak it in a bucket before slicing it, which is what he told us his family had done for generations.</p>
<p>Catera45…the name of the supermarket is Mars and the location I visit is in Aberdeen just off I-95 (when heading north from Baltimore). I can’t recall the Route Number but I always stop for gas at Royal Farms at that exit, heading east. Royal Farms is across the street from the strip mall where Mars is situated.</p>
<p>I gotta get some sliced for 95yo, mom. Salty food sometimes makes her appetite better. We used to have VirginiaHam strips at THX and XMas gatherings in the 50-60’s. It was a real treat when some of my parents friends would bring a cold cut meat platter, a tradition from the old country. </p>
<p>DW makes a stone soup with VH.</p>
<p>We made proscutti, cheese hoagies when were poorer and young. We would try different hams, beef, sausages. Never the same twice. A beer or wine accompanied us to the park.</p>
<p>Hah, hah. I sent Santa a country ham link:</p>
<p>[Old</a> Waynesboro Country Ham Center and End Slices-3 Pak Spl. - $21.00](<a href=“http://northstateproducts.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=1&products_id=5]Old”>http://northstateproducts.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=1&products_id=5)</p>
<p>And, sure enough, a package arrived priorty mail the other day from the North Pole (somewhere in North Carolina). Yum. I can’t wait to see the look on my family’s faces when I tell 'em I’ve decided to skip the turkey this year and serve country ham for Christmas dinner! :)</p>