How to Get a Ham
“Ham for Easter dinner is like a new Easter bonnet. Something that has to be.”
Ann Batchelder, Ladies Home Journal
What if you hadn't thought ahead and bought up a canned ham when there were still some around or put in an order for a smoked ham weeks ago? What if you didn't happen to be in the butcher shop or grocery when a meager delivery of hams was put out in the open? Well, Gimbel’s had announced that they were going to have around 200 hams some time that week, but, as Clementine Paddleford noted in the Herald Tribune, the store’s PR announcement cleverly didn’t say when this miraculous event would occur.
Paddleford also reported that you still could get an Easter ham through a tie-in purchase from the Delicacy of the Season Club run by Forsts's Catskill Mountain Smokehouse in Kingston, NY. For $37.50, about a week’s average salary, they promised delivery by Easter of a sugar-cured smoked ham ready to eat and then three more deliveries of smoked meats through the year, ending with a smoked turkey for Christmas. The A&P had advertised a ham dinner for four in an ad that ran in Life just before Easter. For $2.31 (average price) you got baked ham steak and raisin sauce; peas and carrots with pimientos; hash brown potatoes; avocado & grapefruit salad; hot cross buns and spread, and prune plums. There was no mention of this offer (or of ham, beef or lamb of any kind) in the A&P ads that ran in New York newspapers that week.
If you had a ham this Easter, chances were you got it courtesy of Mr. Black. Who was Mr. Black? While the meat industry in its propaganda evoked images of Prohibition and swarthy foreigners making back alley deals, there was no evidence that organized crime was involved in a big way in the meat trade, as they were in the far more lucrative black market for clothing and textiles, where phony invoicing made highway robbery a cinch. There were no butcher shop equivalents of the speakeasies where you had to know a secret password for entrance. Most black market meat was moving through the same channels as the ceiling-price meat and at a greater volume. Mr. Black was probably your neighborhood butcher.
In many cases this meant nothing more than that he would set aside any ham that was delivered to him for his favored customers. Perhaps he took their order ahead of time or phoned them when a shipment came in. A favored customer was likely to be one who remembered him at Christmas, tipped for services that usually were free and didn’t watch the scale like a hawk when he was weighing an order. A favored customer didn’t ask what the ceiling price was for the meat she was buying and she bought his bologna, sausages and chopped meat when he had nothing else to offer. She didn’t shop around. She definitely wasn’t the kind of person who would rat him out to the OPA or blab to her less favored neighbors about where she got her ham.
It wasn’t that butchers were making a killing off the black market. If the neighborhood butcher wanted the good cuts from the wholesale distributor, he probably had to buy far more intestines, kidneys, hearts, bologna and meat scraps than he could sell. His supplier might charge him dues to belong to a phony cooperative. Meat was sometimes misgraded and short weighted at wholesale. For the most part these were longstanding “sharp business practices” that had merely become more blatant and widespread during the war and its aftermath when the counter-sentiment to the official “let’s all pitch in together and win this” mantra was the fear that playing by the rules was for suckers.
As a last resort, the homemaker could buy canned pork meat products. A couple of SPAM or Treet loafs could be smashed together, as magazine ads suggested, scored, glazed and studded with cloves, then baked and served as if they were hams. There also was a lot of government-surplus canned meat hitting the market. But Clementine Paddleford felt that this would be an act of cruelty to our returning servicemen. This was their Easter after all.