Sweating over ham

There is a ham sweating in my kitchen. It's missing about two inches of meat where poorly-sharpened knives carved their way through many thin slices of flesh last night. The outer layers of cured fat were set aside during the cutting process so they could later be pressed onto the exposed strips before being draped by a clean dish towel. We don't have a drainboard; we use spread-out dish towels to dry our freshly-washed dishes.

Last night, Salvador waltzed in the door and announced to me that he was going to buy a ham and some cheese, and that he was inviting people over. Curled up on the couch working on grad school applications, under a blanket and with my heater-fan pointed toward me, I said that was fine. People started drifting in around 9p.m., and after awhile I gave in and put on real pants instead of the red East tennis warm-up pants I'd been wearing since late morning. Salvador broke out his ham stand (I have no idea what this is actually called, but every single Spaniard ever has owned one). He is somewhat incompetent when it comes to household anything, so one of his friends was put to work setting it up and clamping the enormous ham leg that had been appeared to the board.

Hams in Spain are expensive. Apparently, the best kind you can get is called "pata negra," meaning black hoof. Our ham, we were told, was of the utmost quality; had Salvador not gotten a special price, it would have cost about 400 euros. 400 euros??? 400 euros. Holy crap. I later consulted the price tag that was somehow permanently afixed to the ham's lower shin (do ham's have shins?) and saw that it had costed over 230 euros. Definitely a better deal than 400, but holy crap.... I think the price of ham inflates Spaniards' sense of how good they actually are. To be fair, I've never really liked ham, but even if I did, I doubt I could ever justify spending that kind of money on a piece of meat just because it tasted good. Salvador told us that last year he bought over 30 hams. What the hell do you do with 30 hams?

So our more-than-200-euro ham is sitting awkwardly on our slightly rickety ham-holder. Rafa is somehow elected ham-slicer, and begins to shave off thin strips of meat. I was impressed by the fact that the ham had the ability to become smellier post being cut into. This of course seems obvious, but it was already pretty smelly. It was kind of like a train wreck. Mr. Awkwardly-Propped Ham Leg was shifting with every cut, Rafa was quietly cursing the dull knife, Spaniards were eyeing the slowly-filling plate of ham pieces, and the cured tan outer part of the ham was starting to sweat. I got my camera.

It became clear to me fairly early on that I would not be eating this ham. As I said, I've never really liked ham. I do eat it on occassion, mostly either to placate insistent Spaniards or to add some protein to mediocre Spanish hostel breakfasts. Never before, though, have I eaten ham that was still attached to its foot (or at least not that I was able to see). It was disturbing. There were little toenail-like things not very far from where Rafa was slicing. And then there was the sweating. I don't really like eating things that are still sweating. For a few minutes, I thought of Michael Pollan's book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, in which, the author decides to make a meal entirely out of things he has hunted, gathered, and grown himself. Part of this means killing his own meat. He agonizes over whether or not he will be able to bring himself to shoot an animal, and finally decides that, as a conscious omnivore, participating in the killing of his food is the only responsible action he can take. Wouldn't it be problematic to refuse to eat meat only because I was being confronted with the reality of modern meat-eating in a way I never had been before? Well, maybe, but I think the grossness of having a awkward, sweating ham leg teetering under a blunt knife in your living room might override whatever responsibility I might have to face my participation in the systematic slaughter of animals for consumption. So I stood there, snacking on bread, tomatoes, and the occassional slice of cheese, sipping wine, and trying not to come too close to ham sweat. Everyone else seemed to enjoy the ham.

Now I have a new problem: The better part of an enormous sweating ham is sitting in my kitchen. The entire apartment smells of cured ham sweat. There are little bits of ham-ooze gathering near a little puddle of ham sweat where the wooden board meets our granite countertop. To complicate the situation, we have recently discovered a small but persistent population of maggots that like to crawl around our kitchen ceiling. I don't do well with anything that looks like a worm. Smaller does not make it better. After dousing the cupboards with bleach, throwing out all open food, and sealing everything in tupperware and ziploc bags, I thought we had a fighting chance of getting rid of them. Today I had to ask Salvador to kill five of them. I have a feeling that the maggots do not share my dislike of 230-euro ham.