Cover Story
Ham-handed Allan Benton
A school guidance counselor in quest of a master’s degree, Benton had a hot plate in his room, and when he took to frying up the ham from his home in Madisonville—about 50 miles southwest of Knoxville—the heady scent filled the entire dormitory, luring students to his door, plate in hand. “I kept my dad busy getting hams for me.”
Most often, his source was Albert Hicks, a dairy farmer who cured hams the old-fashioned way, with time and patience. “Albert was milking about 35 old cows a day. In 1946, he had a visitor from Boston who stayed with him for a couple weeks. When the fellow was leaving to go back north, he asked Albert how he might get some of that ham and bacon he had been enjoying so much during his visit. Albert told him it was all dry-cured meat from his own smokehouse and that he’d be happy to send a ham home with him. The man said, ‘That’s fine, but can you get me 100?’ Albert was pretty taken aback, but he said, ‘If you come back here next year, I’ll see what I can do.’ ”
That’s how Hicks came to be in the country ham business, curing the meat in the smokehouse in his backyard. In addition to supplying his buyer in Boston, Hicks began curing hams for his neighbors, who were only too happy to leave the time-honored but time-consuming Southern tradition to someone else. The dairy-farmer-turned-country-ham-purveyor did this work for 26 years, building a small, self-sustaining business. Hicks’ decision to retire in 1973 coincided with Benton’s epiphany that an educator’s salary in rural Tennessee would not cut the mustard. When he heard that Hicks was giving up the business, he decided to give it a shot. “I knew a little bit about country ham,” he says. “Both of my parents were brought up in Scott County, Va., in a place about as rural as you could get. They lived a mile from each other, and back then and there, you could only court someone if you could walk to their house. So after a while, they got married and moved down here. But every Thanksgiving, we went back up there and butchered hogs. We would start on Wednesday night and spend all day Thanksgiving and Friday working the meat.
“When I decided to take over Albert’s business, I jumped feet first. I had no business plan except to make a little money. I picked his brain and went to every university ag program in the South and just tried to combine the two. For the first four years, we weren’t inspected. Then I started working with U.T. and the U.S.D.A. meat inspectors. Between the two of them, I’ve been able to figure it out.”
Such modesty is inherent in the character of this unassuming man who, in speech, mannerism and earnestness, brings to mind the aw-shucks presidential candidacy of a Georgia peanut farmer. “We make quality our No. 1 priority every day,” he vows. “If it’s not right, we don’t sell it.”
To get it right, Benton begins with good product. About a year ago, he met Brooklyn writer, cookbook author, naturalist and lifelong “hamthropologist” Peter Kaminsky, and he recommends his latest book, Pig Perfect, to everyone who expresses an interest in pork meat. The tome takes Kaminsky from a Kentucky general store to an ancient village in Andalusia as he seeks the perfect pig. Along the way, he assails corporate animal-raising and meat-processing, in particular the massive hog farms known as Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, or CAFOs. Kaminsky has clearly become a heroic crusader in Benton’s view. “We’re buying as much as we can of heritage hogs. I can’t tell you for sure if it’s better, but if it is, I want it.”
The hams and slabs of bacon are delivered to a squat cinderblock building set back on a gravel parking lot on Highway 411. Painted on the front, under the words “Benton’s Smokey Mountain Country Hams, ” is the boast, “We Cure ’Em,” a promise underscored by the overpowering scent of meat, salt and smoke. Benton’s wife Sharon, who took up the role of professional educator in the family (they have three grown children), warns that the smell will permeate clothing, hair and even skin, and will require professional assistance to remove. “I haven’t smelled it in 30 some years,” says Allan with a grin. The front room of the operation looks much like a country store; a wooden bench with a cracked leather seat serves as the waiting area for a steady stream of customers, most of whom know the Bentons and one another. A deli case holds cold cuts, and a dry-erase board atop that lists prices for steaks, chicken and their most famous products: bacon, ham and sausage.
But it is in the rear of the building where the magic takes place, unaided and unabridged by modern technology—anything that turns out a so-called country ham in as few as 40 days is an abomination to country ham purists. When a ham comes into Allan Benton’s world, it’s not going anywhere for at least a year, during which time it undergoes multiple processes, each conducted by human hands.
There’s the Rub The year-long curing process starts with salt.
In the first stage, the 9- to 10-month hams get a rub of salt and brown sugar, while the so-called “old hams”—aged 14 to16 months—get salt, brown sugar, red and black pepper. Benton and his father built the saltbox that contains the rub. The strong maple doesn’t splinter and has no acidity. The rubbed hams are kept on maple board in a 38- to 40-inch cooler, then re-salted a week later. After a period of time, they are moved to an equalization cooler—about 10 degrees warmer—and hung “shank side down to make a prettier ham.” A couple months later, they are flipped, brought out of the cooler and left in the main aging room for several months, depending on their destinations. (Professional chefs typically insist on the older hams and prosciutto.) Each rack of hams carries a tag marked with the date the hams arrived, how many in the lot, total weight at start, the date they went into the cure, the date they were overhauled and the date they came out of salt. According to Darrell Benton, Allan’s son who has been learning the ropes since high school, it is at the peak of the aging process when the hams are smoked. That process takes place in a rudimentary smokehouse in the backyard of the building, not dissimilar to Albert Hicks’ original set-up. Benton uses mostly hickory and some apple wood. Once out of the smokehouse, the hams depart pretty quickly, either sold out the front door or shipped from the back, Darrell says. The curing and smoking processes are similar for bacon, though not as long.
These days—thanks in large part to Blackberry Farm chef John Fleer—Benton lives pretty high on the hog. It was several years ago that Fleer, acclaimed chef for the luxury Smoky Mountain getaway, discovered the porcine treasure in his own backyard. “I owe so much to John Fleer,” Benton says. “He has really spread the word.” Latitude restaurant in the West End Marriott was the first Nashville kitchen to claim Benton’s ham and bacon, after opening chef Jay Denham met Allan at a photo shoot. These days, F. Scott’s Will Uhlhorn, Cabana’s Brian Uhl, Radius10’s Jason Brumm, Midtown Café’s Paul Ent and Watermark’s Joe Shaw regularly put his product on a plate. But Benton’s reputation spreads far beyond the Tennessee border. Frank Stitt uses it at Highlands Bar & Grill in Birmingham, as does Linton Hopkins at Restaurant Eugene in Atlanta. A meeting with John Edge of Southern Foodways Alliance led to a field trip to Manhattan for Sharon and Allan Benton so the couple could meet the top-tier chefs in that city who hold the hams and bacon in such high regard. Edge chronicled in the October 2006 issue of Gourmet the visits to New York dining destinations Craft, Momofuku and Mario Batali’s restaurant Del Posto. The jaunt was a memorable experience for the self-described East Tennessee hillbilly. “When John first asked me if I wanted to go to New York, I said no, that I had been within 15 miles of New York City twice in my life and never went in because I knew I wouldn’t like it. Well, he and Sharon talked me into it and I was right. I didn’t like it. I loved it. What a place! What incredible food! What those chefs were doing with my ham and bacon did me proud.”Benton says they cure about 12,000 hams a year, and he hopes to increase that number, though not at the cost of decreasing his turn-around time. “A few years ago, I thought for sure that quick-cure country hams would put us out of business. But it hasn’t hurt us a bit. They cost less than ours do, but ours taste better, and there are a lot of people out there who are willing to wait a bit longer and pay a bit more for quality.”