Bayonne Ham

There is a famous anecdote about a wet nurse from the Béarn who went to the Louvre to visit her former charge, the grown-up King Henry IV. Noticing that there were no hams hanging from the ceiling, a sign of wealth in a Béarn home, the nurse exclaimed, “Henri, my Henri, you must be so hungry! I’ll send you a ham as soon as I get back home!”

Ah, the Basques and the Béarnaise and their fine-textured jambon de Bayonne! It has been famous since the Middle Ages; on the portal of the Église Sainte-Marie in Oloron I saw sculptures of a man slaughtering a pig and then preparing ham from its legs. Contrary to what has been written about Bayonne ham in many source books, it is not smoked; it is a salt-cured country ham dried over a period of at least a year.