Country Home
Cooking with
Heirloom Foods

Newsom's aged Kentucky country ham was included in a feature in Country Home magazine in the Nov. 2005 issue. The ham was featured as part of a heritage holiday dinner that would grace a country table anytime. The products used in the recipes for the feature were identified as heirloom foods.

There were heritage turkeys, beans, wild rice, Iroquois white corn, cranberries and country ham. The recipies were Maple and Balsamic GLazed Heritage Turkey, Country Ham and Wild Rice Stuffing and Cranberry Chutney with Caramelized Onions.

Here is what the Country Home writers had to say about the ham:

COUNTRY HAM Long-aged country ham lends a deep, smoky note to our wild rice stuffing, and it will do the same for simple vegetable sautes. You can also use it as you would prosciutto or speck, thinly sliced on a cheese and fruit plate. Nancy Newsoms Mahaffey is one of the last remaining Kentuckians who dry-cures country ham (as compared to brine-cured "city ham") the old-fashioned way without chemicals. ... It's flavor ripens for a year or more after a long, slow smoking.

Looking at The HEIRLOOM MARKET for this feature Country Home found generations of gardeners and cooks connected with their edible heritage through the tradition of seed saving, preserving the most flavorful, juicy, and beautiful progenies for harvests to come. With the trend in agribusiness, many of these heirlooms disappeared in a deluge of durable, uniform varieties that could be grown anywhere and withstand shipping, at the expense of taste. Fortunately, revivalist farmers are bringing heirloom produce, heritage meats (such as fuller-flavored Berkshire pork), heritage-variety fresh eggs, and farmstead cheeses to local markets, selling them to grocery chains, and even shipping fresh from their Web sites. ...In some parts of the country... it is now easy to find purple-striped rattlesnake beans with their curly tips; every imaginable shape and hue of potato, from flavorful All-Blues to knobby fingerlings; a cornucopie of Hubbard, Turban, and Crookneck squash; and snappy, naturally blushed apples galore. Visit www.seedsavers.org for heirloom seeds and their kitchen uses.

And, the ham .... you are joining thousands whose search for heirloom foods has led them to this Web site. The ham can be purchased only from Newsom's. We welcome your order through our Web site today, or any day, round the clock; and we welcome your inquiry at our store on East Main Street in Princeton, Ky., on Monday through Friday from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. and Saturdays from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. — come by or call 270-365-2482.