Taking the country out of ham.

• Author: Bailey, David
• Position: North Carolina country ham business

TAKING THE COUNTRY OUT OF HAM

John Egerton was heading down Interstate 85 at 65 mph when he saw the sign touting Stadler's Country Hams. A food writer and a lover of country hams since his boyhood days in Cadiz, Ky., Egerton hit the brakes.

Inside the Burlington Outlet Mall, Egerton found a shrine dedicated to one of his favorite foods. As he followed a path through a panorama that included three rustic smokehouses made of rough-hewn logs, he saw how the old-time curers used to slather their hams with salt in the dead of winter, wash the salt off a couple of months later and then hang them up to ripen slowly in spring's balmy warmth and summer's scorching heat.

"I went through all that and then saw the movie, and I said, 'I got to buy me some of that ham.'

"I bought it and brought it home and cooked it, and let me tell you something: My dog wouldn't eat that stuff."

Egerton insists he's not getting down on any one man's product or the North Carolina country-ham industry in general. All quick-cured hams -- and by that he means a ham cured less than a year -- aren't, in his opinion, fit to eat. Major meat processors, he says, are so hungry for profits that they're taking the country right out of the ham.

"He's right if he's talking about a long-cured ham," admits Virgil Stadler, vice president of Stadler's Country Hams Inc. in Elon College. "There is a total difference."

But Stadler, whose hams are processed for about 95 days, figures the product he's producing must have a certain appeal. Last year, his company sold some 400,000 hams.

Egerton, who now lives in Nashville, Tenn., and writes for Southern Living and Food & Wine, warns: "They're making a new definition of country ham, and if we keep eating enough of that stuff, then at some point in the future, enough of us older ones will have died off so that the mass of the population will only know country ham as that stuff they're selling."

Last year, more than 35 federally approved operations in North Carolina cured more than 3.3 million country hams, estimates Dwayne Pilkington, a meat specialist at N.C. State University. Most of those hams were processed the newfangled way in a carefully controlled environment (almost no North Carolina country hams are smoked), then sold in a thoroughly modern manner: between biscuits in fast-food restaurants or in vacuum packs hung from grocery-store displays.

Ever since 1955, when Wilbert Hancock and his wife, Shirley, started cutting up ham in their kitchen and selling it by the slice around Asheboro, pre-sliced ham sales have taken off. Nowadays, processors slice the majority of the hams they produce. Stadler's, for instance, slices 95 percent of its hams, and Siler City's Hickory Mountain Farms Inc. slices 85 percent of the 425,000 hams it produces.

Sales were propelled even higher in 1978, when Hardee's introduced its Rise 'N' Shine Biscuits, some of them stuffed with North Carolina country ham. Introducing country ham in eat-and-run restaurants is what took the product national, industry observers say.

In fact, most processors say the biggest problem they now have is meeting demand. "It's a great complaint to have," Stadler says.

But that demand has not outstripped supply enough to drive up prices. A pound of country ham today costs only about a nickel -- or 3 percent -- more than it did 11 years ago. Meanwhile, other costs have increased by an estimated 20 percent. Producers who don't want to see their margins shrink like hams in a smokehouse have to get more efficient or cure more meat.

The large processors have done both, resulting in an industry dominated by a handful of big players who are getting bigger all the time. Of course, that's to be expected in an industry that is reaching...