4 recipes that use smoked pork ham hock, with photos, step-by-step instructions and cook times. The quickest, Hoppin' John, takes 85 minutes. It is most often cooked with onion, garlic and carrot.
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London particular is a thick, yellow-green soup of split peas and smoked pork ham hock, named after the pea-souper smogs that once smothered the city. It was a cheap winter warmer in Victorian London eating houses and is still on menus in pubs and cafés when the weather turns. The hock gives a deep smoky saltiness and shreds of soft meat. Chef's tip: skim the grey foam off as the water first boils, for a cleaner taste.
Shepherds in the Béarn valleys and farmers across Gascony have eaten garbure through the cold months for centuries, and it is still the centrepiece of village rugby-club suppers and winter fêtes. It is a soup so thick that, as people in Pau like to say, the ladle should almost stand up in it: white beans, cabbage, potatoes, leeks and turnips cooked down slowly, finished with pieces of duck confit warmed through in the pot. A ham hock is often added too; that version is a pork dish as well as a duck one, so leave it out if you need to. Serve it in deep bowls with thick slices of country bread. Chef's tip: hold back the salt until the very end, because confit duck and ham hock both season the soup as they warm.
Hoppin' John is eaten on New Year's Day across the South for luck, with collard greens for money and cornbread for gold, and its roots run back to the rice plantations of the South Carolina Lowcountry and the West African cooks who worked them. Black-eyed peas are simmered with smoked pork (here a ham hock and bacon), then cooked with rice so every grain takes on the smoky broth. Chef's tip: cook the rice in the bean liquor, not water; that is where all the flavour is.
Collard greens simmered low and slow with smoked pork are at the heart of African American soul food and of Southern Sunday dinners and New Year's tables from Alabama to Virginia. The tough leaves melt into silky, savoury greens, and the cooking liquid, the 'pot likker', is so good it is sopped up with cornbread. Chef's tip: strip out the thick stems and wash the leaves in three changes of water; grit is the commonest complaint.
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