Country ham is a signature dish of United States; we have verified places to eat it in Greenville, Nashville and Richmond. Dry-cured ham from the Appalachian foothills: salt-cured, hickory-smoked, aged six months or more.
Country ham · Greenville
Dry-cured ham from the Appalachian foothills: salt-cured, hickory-smoked, aged six months or more. Served thin on biscuits at breakfast, or as a cured meat platter.
Country ham is a Carolina mountain tradition: pigs raised in the Appalachian foothills, cured with salt rubs, smoked over hickory, aged through the cool months. The technique came with Scotch-Irish settlers in the 1700s. Greenville sits at the edge of country ham country; Soby's keeps a country ham starter on the menu year-round.
Where to eat in Greenville:
- Soby's New South Cuisine
- Tupelo Honey
- Stella's Southern Brasserie
Where to eat Country ham in Greenville: the editor picks
Tennessee country ham · Nashville
Salt-cured, smoke-cured and aged Tennessee ham, sliced thin and pan-fried. The signature pork product of the region, with redeye gravy as its match.
Tennessee country ham follows a 200-year-old tradition: pork hind legs are salt-cured for several weeks, smoked, then aged six to 18 months. The result is a dry, salty ham closer to Italian prosciutto than to wet-cured American ham. Loveless Cafe's country-ham program has run since 1951 in Nashville. Edwards in Surry, Virginia and Newsom's in Princeton, Kentucky are the regional producers Nashville restaurants source from most often.
Where to eat in Nashville:
- Loveless Cafe
- Husk Nashville
- Monell's Dining and Catering
Where to eat Tennessee country ham in Nashville: the editor picks
Country ham · Richmond
Dry-cured-and-smoked Virginia country ham, sliced thin and served center-cut on Sally Bell's box-lunch plates and inside The Roosevelt's biscuits. Smithfield-style is the canonical version.
Captain Mallory Todd of Smithfield, Virginia made the first known commercial export of cured Smithfield ham in 1779. The Virginia General Assembly later codified the Smithfield ham name in a 1926 statute tied to peanut-fed hogs from the Virginia and North Carolina peanut belt (the peanut-belt requirement was removed in 1966; the geographic-processing requirement remains). The dry-cure, salt-rub and slow-smoke method became a Virginia trade. Smithfield is now a Smithfield Foods brand, but small smokehouses across the region (Edwards, Surryano, Gwaltney) continue the country-cured tradition.
Where to eat in Richmond:
- Sally Bell's Kitchen
- The Roosevelt
- Lemaire
Where to eat Country ham in Richmond: the editor picks