Smithfield Ham Biscuit appears as a signature dish in 1 United States cities. See each city's local variant and where to eat it.
Smithfield ham biscuit · Richmond
The ham biscuit is the Virginia tea-table and tailgate staple. Country-cured Smithfield ham sliced paper-thin and pressed inside a small buttermilk biscuit. Sally Bell's box-lunch standard since 1924.
Captain Mallory Todd of Smithfield, Virginia (about 70 miles east of Richmond) made the first known commercial export of cured Smithfield ham in 1779; Virginia's General Assembly later codified the Smithfield ham name in a 1926 statute restricting it to hams cured, smoked and processed within the town. The dry-cure-and-smoke method of country-curing pork hindquarters became a colonial Virginia trade. The biscuit-and-ham combination appears in early-twentieth-century Virginia cookbooks as the canonical tea-table snack. Sally Bell's Kitchen has sold them in their box lunches since 1924, and Mama J's Kitchen in Jackson Ward keeps them on the menu today.
Where to eat in Richmond:
- Sally Bell's Kitchen
- Mama J's Kitchen
- The Roosevelt