Jambon d'Auvergne

Appearance & taste

The ham is a rounded leg of even colour and fairly firm consistency. The slice is firm and has a thin rim of fat; the lean is evenly red to dark red, the fat white to slightly yellow or pink. The texture ranges from melting to dry. The taste is clean, with a long finish, typical of dried pork and with a nutty aroma that may have a slight note of garlic. As ripening progresses, the smell and taste become stronger.

The finished ham contains at most 61 % water, 6.5 % salt and 0.7 % soluble sugar. It is sold on the bone or boned, whole, halved, quartered or in sixths, freshly sliced or packed in slices. The label may carry the addition “jambon sec” (dried ham), at most three quarters the size of the name.

Production

The legs come from female or castrated male fattening pigs whose feed consists of at least 60 % cereals, oilseeds and their by-products. They are cut at most 6 cm from the head of the femur, weigh at least 8.5 kg trimmed and have at least 10 mm of fat at the base.

The fresh legs are salted with dry salt containing a little garlic and then ripen and dry for at least 240 days. Depending on their initial weight, they lose at least 28 to 29.5 % of their weight in the process. According to the specification, during drying by sweating, fat is broken down and the fat in the muscle melts out, which deepens the colour and promotes the aromas. From salting to the end of ripening the ham stays in the area of origin.

Origin & history

The area lies on a massif about 1,000 m high made up of high plateaus, volcanic cones and many valleys. The climate is continental. The rugged terrain lies across the moist westerly winds, so that strong föhn winds favour drying.

Until the middle of the 20th century, farmers kept pigs and dry-salted the meat. The hams were made in winter, because there were no cold stores and only the cold of the uplands allowed good salting and drying; they were eaten between the harvest in summer and the holidays at the turn of the year. At first they often hung on the chimney wall, where they developed aromas without being smoked, and then dried in cold, ventilated rooms. Garlic, long grown in the lowlands of the area, went into the curing salt.

As early as 1767 a Paris mail-order catalogue offered “highly esteemed” hams from Arnac in Cantal, and in 1834 it was said that the most esteemed hams came from Maurs and Aurillac. People from the Auvergne who moved to Paris from the 19th century onwards made the cured products of their home region known there. More than 15 of today’s businesses were already operating before the Second World War. Today 78 % of the meat products and charcuterie made in the area are dry-cured products, compared with 16 % nationwide.