How to Carve a Ham

Set the ham on a big board with the fat side up and give it a minute before you cut anything. There are two bones in there. The aitch bone is a wedge of hip near the wide end, and the leg bone runs the length of the ham away from it.

Press the tip of your knife straight down in a few spots across the top until it stops on something hard. That is your map. Everything after this is a cut that rides along one of those two bones.

Start the blade right against the aitch bone and push it straight down until you feel the board underneath. Keep the edge in contact with the bone the whole way. Dave Frick treats this as one long cut, not a sawing motion.

You are not slicing the ham yet. This cut separates a whole section of meat from the skeleton, which turns a bone-in ham into a boneless one you can handle on a flat surface.

Turn the blade and follow the leg bone back toward the hock, staying tight against it, then go down to the board again. The section comes away in one piece. On a full size ham that first chunk runs around five pounds.

Move it to a second board and leave the bone where it is. All of the slicing happens on these free pieces, which is the whole trick. Nobody carves neat slices while fighting a bone.

Rotate the ham and make the same cut on the next face. Down at the aitch bone, along the leg bone, out to the board. Another big boneless piece drops free. Do it once or twice more until the bone is bare on every side.

There is still good meat clinging to that bone, and it is worth keeping. It goes into bean soup, split pea, a pot of greens, or diced into scrambled eggs the next morning.

Cut the big sections in half so each one sits flat and stays a size your hand can steady. Then shave off the dry outer edge and any heavy rind before you slice.

Doing the trimming now is a small courtesy that shows up at the table. Nobody has to saw a rind off their own portion, and every slice that reaches the platter is edible end to end.

Look at the cut face and find the direction the muscle fibers run. Turn the piece so your knife crosses those fibers rather than running with them, then slice down in steady strokes at an even thickness.

Cutting across the grain shortens every fiber, and short fibers are what your teeth read as tender. Get it backwards and the ham is still good, as Dave says on camera, but it chews longer than it should.

Let the slices fall into an overlapping row on the board as they come off the knife instead of stacking them in a pile. Slide a knife under the whole row and lift it onto a warm platter in one move, and the arrangement survives the trip.

Slice only what the table is going to eat. Meat left in a solid piece holds its moisture in the fridge far better than loose slices do.