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Allan Benton’s grandparents arose long before daylight every Thanksgiving Day on their farm in the England Valley community of Scott County, Virginia. While the women crumbled cornbread for sage dressing inside the farmhouse, the men laid out ammunition, sharpened knives, and hauled out tackle for hog killing.

Allan Benton never forgot childhood slices of salt-cured ham, flavored by Virginia winter chill and summer heat. The pull of pork eventually brought the former schoolteacher full circle. Now he’s the proprietor of Benton’s Smoky Mountain Country Hams, between Vonore and Madisonville, Tennessee, in a building that houses sometimes as many as 8,000 hams.

Allan describes it as “a hole-in-the wall business.” Grain-fed hams are rubbed down with salt and brown sugar in a 25-year-old maple saltbox made by Allan and his father. The hams are cured for as long as 16 months.

Allan’s preferred cooking method is pan-frying the ham in a black iron skillet. He recommends pouring half a cup of coffee into the skillet and stirring in “a big old pinch of brown sugar.” He lays the slices of ham on top of the sugary liquid and steams them, with a lid on, then removes the lid and browns the meat lightly on both sides.

– Fred Sauceman, October 2, 2007

What follows is a portion of the original interview that has been edited for length. To download the entire transcript in PDF form, please click here.

Listen to this 5-minute audio clip of Allan Benton talking about his curing process. [Windows Media Player required. Go here to download the player for free.]

Edited Transcript

Subject: Allan Benton of Benton’s Smoky Mountain Country Hams in
Madisonville, TN
Date: October 4, 2006
Location: East Tennessee State University – Johnson City, TN
Interviewer: N/A; Speaking to Fred Sauceman’s Foodways of Appalachia class

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I was born in Scott County, Virginia. Some of you may not know where that it, but it’s about fifty miles from here, where I was born. A section known as England Valley there in Scott County. It was so far back in the hills that you literally have to look straight up nearly to see daylight. If you’re familiar with that region, you know I’ve not stretched it at all. But the hills come down very sharp, and you have to look up to see the sun at noon. That’s about the only time you see it.

My grandparents lived a mile apart there. And I tell folks that it’s not by accident that my parents got married because you had to court somebody within walking distance. [Laughs] That eliminated a lot of folks in this world.

But we would go home to Virginia on Wednesday night before Thanksgiving, from my earliest memories as a young child, all the way through high school. And we would spend all day Thanksgiving Day butchering hogs for both sides of the family. It was literally a way of life. My grandparents lived about as isolated and about as primitive a lifestyle as anybody could live in this country in the [nineteen] forties, fifties, and sixties. They raised everything they ate: vegetables, meat. They ate very little beef, quite a bit of chicken and lots of pork. And the fatter they could get those hogs the better because they didn’t have Wesson oil in those days. They used the lard from those animals for seasoning and shortening. And we would get up way before daylight. We would have the water hot. And at the first break of day, my grandfather would hook and old—hitch an old horse or mule to his sled—didn’t own a wagon. It was too rough, and he couldn’t use a wagon on that place. And he would hitch his sled up to the horse or mule, go over to the hog pen and shoot the first hog. And we would haul them one at a time because the hogs were so heavy. About one would be all you’d want to put on there at a time. They would be six, seven hundred pounds. And we would typically spend pretty much all day Thursday, Friday, and Saturday working up all that meat for both sides of the family. Again, they only lived a mile apart. And they would typically spend all that time—they would kiln the sausage, they would put the hams and the bacon in cure, and we would spend quite a bit of time salting the meat, then make our trip back to Madisonville, where we resided. And that was pretty much the routine all the way through high school. In fact, I never ate a turkey in my life—until I was grown—on Thanksgiving Day. We had fresh pork. We ate everything on that hog that could be consumed except the chitlins [or chitterlings]. My folks didn’t use the chitlins as most folks here in this upper east Tennessee area didn’t. And I think it depended on what part of Europe those residents came from that settled this region that dictated their use of those things. But they didn’t use a natural casing to stuff their sausage, and they didn’t use chitlins. And, other than that, we ate the tail, the tongue, the ears, the brains, the feet, everything on that hog. We ate the lungs. I didn’t particularly like those. They—they—the old folks called them the lights. And they were a spongy sweet meat that I didn’t really care for. But they ate every bit of that hog.

About the time I got out of high school, my grandparents were getting some age on the, And they were to the point that they were getting infirm, and they had begun to quit raising those hogs. So we started purchasing hams from a man there in our community, who had a place in his backyard and he sold those hams and bacon from his little smokehouse behind his house. His name was Albert Hicks.

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Now that business that I’m running, it was pretty much started by accident by Albert Hicks. He was a dairy farmer in our county, milking about thirty-five or forty hogs—or cows, rather. I’m in the hog business; you’ll have to excuse that. [Laughs] And he—he—that would be hard to do. [Laughs] He—he was milking those cattle and just barely making a living. And a fellow came to visit from New York City. He was a relative of Albert’s wife. And he stayed there for a couple of weeks. And when he got ready to go back to New York, he inquired as to what kind of meat he was having for breakfast every morning. And Albert explained to him that it was just dry-cured meat from his smokehouse. The fellow asked a lot of questions and finally inquired where he might buy hams like that. Well in 1946 you couldn’t really buy hams like that in the grocery store much. And Albert told him that wasn’t a problem, that he had some up in his smokehouse that he’d be glad to let him have some. And Albert said, “How many do you think you want?” And the fellow said, “Well, at least a hundred.” And Albert said, “Oh, Lord, I’ve never had that many hogs.” Well they talked on for a few minutes, and Albert finally told that gentleman that, if he was serious, he would go out and purchase hog—or hams from people when they butchered their hogs in the community, and he would cure them for him. If he’d come back in a year, he would have them ready. Well that fellow agreed to do that. So, true to his word, when hog killing weather came along, Albert went out in the community and started trying to purchase fresh hams. Well as we say out there in that part of the country, word sort of norated around in the community that he was doing that. People began to go over there and knock on the door and say, “Will you sell us one of those hams that you’re fixing for that gentleman from New York?” And, being an enterprising fellow, Albert stuck to his word, and he kept those hams for that fellow, but that year he went to Fletcher Brothers Packing Company in Lenoir City and bought either two hundred or three hundred fresh hams to cure to sell. And that’s how he eased into the country ham business.

He ran it very successfully from his back yard, until 1973. Albert was sixty-eight years old, and he had just lost about thirty thousand dollars worth of fresh hams that he had to haul and put in tankage due to spoilage. He didn’t know why he lost them. He just did. And that’s when this crazy kid of a guidance counselor goes over there and says, “Lease me the building. I want to try it.”

Well Albert, he tried his best to instill in me all of his knowledge about curing meats. I had enough education under my best, so I wanted to learn more, so I wrote to every university in the South. I wrote to Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, North Carolina, Kentucky, Mississippi—any place that I thought be able to shed light on what I was doing and share information with me. And I soon figured out that the folks at the University of Tennessee there in Knoxville had about all the expertise that I could absorb up here. So I began to let them work with me in that operation. Now I wasn’t government inspected. He was just running that out of his backyard in not much more than an old barn. And the first five years I was in business I was just as guilty as one of these moonshiners up in these hollows, selling illegal hooch. I had to look over my shoulder every time I sold a ham because I thought USDA was on my case every day.

After about four years of that, I had worked hard and business was limited where I was. I was out on this man’s farm with no visibility. And I made my mind up, if I was going to do this, I needed to get kosher and do it right and get USDA inspected. So I contacted USDA, told them what I wanted to do, and started to get my approval on the building and started to work on the building. And, as you can imagine, a high school guidance counselor didn’t make enough money to save much, so I had to borrow everything. We were doing a lot of work on the building ourselves, and it took about a year to do it.

About three or four months before I got the building done, I had a gentleman walk into my ham house in a three-piece suit and an attaché case. And he introduced himself as a compliance officer with the United States Department of Agriculture [USDA]. In those days, I was going to do a Harvest Sale for Miller’s on Henley Street—a department store there in Knoxville—every year. They had what they called a Harvest Sale, usually about this time of the year [October]. And they would invite local farmers to sell stuff on the sidewalk outside their building. It really was a big day of sales for the farmers but especially big for Miller’s—one of the biggest of the year for them. Brought in lots of folks. Well they had called me—Miller’s had—along about November, I guess, and wanted to buy about thirty hams. Well I’m thinking they must be going to give them to their better employees or something. So I took my uninspected hams up there and delivered them, and they hung them right in the middle of that fancy department store. Well one of my competitors there in Knoxville saw it and turned me in to USDA. [Laughs] And he came in and he asked me, he said, “Did you sell some hams to miller’s Department Store?” And I said, “Yes, I did.” He said, “Well, were they government inspected?” I said, “Well now, I carry some inspected hams.” I was having to buy some hams from North Carolina to service some restaurant accounts because I couldn’t cure enough in that old building. And he said, “Well, is that what they were?” And I said, “Well, I didn’t say that’s what they were,” I said, “I carry some.” He said—he kept on trying to get me to lie. And I wouldn’t lie to him. I never did lie to him. And he finally said, “Young man,” he said, “if I catch you doing this again,” he said, “I’m going to fine you up to $10,000 and give you up to three years in the penitentiary.” Well I was young and full of vinegar, and I looked at him, and I said, “Mister,” I said, “you can’t find a jury in this county that will fine me ten dollars and give me three days for what I’m doing.” He said, “Young man, I’m not going to take you over to the courthouse here in Madisonville.” He said, “I’m going to take you to Federal Court in Knoxville.” He said, “Do you have any pull up there?” [Laughs] Well when he said that I opened my voice to s—my mouth to speak but a squeaky little sound is all that came out. [Laughs] He got my attention. [Laughs] But he later laughed about that many times. His name was Charles Marlette. He never came to east Tennessee again, I don’t think, that he didn’t come by to see me. He helped me every way he could. Helped me redesign the racks that I cure my meat on. He became a real ally. He died not too many years after I moved into my new facility, where I’ve been since 1978.

We are very fortunate that we are still in business because I know people who are smarter than I am and who work a lot harder, that have not made it in the country ham business. And we look up every night and say thank you for what we have. We feel truly blessed. I made a decision earl on in my country ham business that I would try to not make more hams; I would try to make better hams. And I think that’s been my salvation because I—I kept thinking that these guys who cure these hams in eighty or ninety days were going to put me out of business. And I made a decision that I needed to try a batch to quick-cure because—I told my father, I said, “They can sell them for a dollar a pound less than I can, and I’ve got to do something to compete.”

So I talked my USDA inspector into letting me try a batch as a trial run. And I just did a few, maybe twenty-five hams. I had a catering truck that came by my business every day and picked a ham up. And we’re very blessed with customers, but this guy was a regular. And I knew I could sell him a ham and get rid of one of those. I cut the first one, and it looked okay, and we sold it to him. In about thirty minutes he called me. And he said, “Allan, I hate to complain,” he said, “this ham is not bad.” “But,” he said, “it’s just not the quality I’m used to getting.” That was the last quick-cure ham I ever made. My dad looked at me, and he said, “Son,” he said, “make the best product you know how to make, no matter what it costs you.” He said, “Whatever you have to do, there will always be people who are looking for quality.”

Two of the best pieces of advice my father ever gave me. The second one, he said, “Always do business with good people, whether you’re selling to them or buying from them, it all works the same.” And that’s an axiom that’s proved itself time and again for me. I have retail customers that have been doing business with me for thirty-three years. I actually have some commercial accounts that are still doing business with me after thirty-three years. And in my business, we desperately try to make the best product we know how to make. Hope that our customers will appreciate it and hope they’ll enjoy it. I think that one blessing for us in this business is probably the fact that some of these people I’m doing business with are just as stubborn as I am; they refuse to desert me after this many years. [Laughs] But if they call me at midnight, and they need hams, they get hams. I don’t let them run out. We try to let nobody provide better service than what we give. That—that coupled with a good quality product, and we feel like that’s part of our success. Others—I owe a great deal to people like Fred [Sauceman], who have kept my name out there. I couldn’t begin to thank him and a lot of other folks.

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But it’s been an ideal way to make a living. I feel very fortunate to have done it all these years. I’m fifty-nine years old. I don’t know how many years I’ve got left. I don’t think I can do it more than thirty or forty more years, probably, before I’ll give up and go home but—. [Laughter]

I’m just trying to bring a young man in now and teach him the business. I’m hoping at least sometime to find time to back off a little bit. It’s not a difficult business. It’s not rocket science, or I certainly couldn’t do it. It’s an easy way to make a living in one way; it’s very much work in another way. My typical workweek is about, probably seventy hours a week. I work six days a week, sometimes anywhere from two to four or five hours on Sundays is pretty typical. I guess it takes a lot of dedication to be in any kind of business. Most people who are in business are probably going to tell you the same thing I’m telling you.

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The fresh meat that I use now, we pull everything in from the Midwest. There’s not a packinghouse left in the state of Tennessee. When I first went into business, first off, I had fifteen competitors curing country hams within a 250-mile radius of my plant. Today, there’s only one that I can think of within 250 miles of me. Most of them have gone the way of the dinosaur. There was one in Glade Spring, over here in Virginia. One in Abingdon. One in Butler, Tennessee. I mean they were—they were just scattered all over the country. The demise of these packinghouses played some role in that. Now, to get delivery, you have to buy a large quantity of fresh meat to get delivery from these guys. Most of the hogs that I cure are raised on feedlots in the Midwest. One—one advantage is it is grain-fed. That’s one advantage to getting it out of the Midwest. I am getting a good grade of hogs from that area.

But it’s—usually, I order out of Missouri or Iowa. It’s probably killed on Thursday, cut on Friday, and shipped to my plant and I get it on Mondays. Typically. When we get those fresh hams in, I’ll usually buy anywhere from four to six hundred fresh hams and x-number of bellies. When we get it in, we unload it and roll it into a cooler. We mix our cure, and we use salt and brown sugar and sodium nitrite to make our hams. I don’t like using nitrite, but USDA, they require you to use nitrite, unless, if you don’t use it, you have to have a salt content of ten percent or greater. Well ten percent would be so salty that you would never buy but one ham from me, and you would hate me forever over the one you bought. Because it would be so salty, nobody would ever buy it. We try to—we try to shoot for a salt content in the five to six percent range on our hams. That’s—that’s pretty standard for us.

When we bring them in, we mix this cure up, and we apply it. We rub about two-thirds of the cure that we’re going to use on that ham the first time we rub it. We usually use about eight pounds of cure, per hundred pounds of hams. So we take about two-thirds of that and rub it on the hams. We stack them in curing bins—just wooden racks that my father and I built on maple boards. And we use maple boards for a reason. First off, it’s low in acid. Oak is high in acid, and it would turn my meat black. It would turn it dark. The maple is low in acid, and it’s also very hard, very unlikely you’re going to get any splintering or anything like that. It’s a very hard, durable—durable piece of wood. So we use maple boards to salt our meat on. We stack them on that, and we leave them for about a week. In about a week, we go back and rework the remaining one-third of that cure into those hams and restack them in curing bins. And they typically stay in that first stage of cure at thirty-eight to forty degrees for about two months—somewhere in the fifty-five to sixty day range.

Then we pull them out and hang them on wooden racks in stockingettes. We use the stockingette to make it shape up into a prettier ham. Remember, I told you that I’d do anything I could to enhance the appearance or the quality of the product I make. We hang those things shank down and roll them into another cooler called an equalization cooler. That cooler stays about forty-two to fifty degrees. We’re trying to emulate Mother Nature. We butchered those hogs over in Scott County in November on Thanksgiving Day. They stayed there in cure for about six weeks. Then we would take them up and hang them up in those little smokehouses. And they would hang there on up until they were used up into the next fall. And we’re emulating that in that cooler. We’re trying to keep it about the same springtime conditions. Sometimes I have a problem with humidity in that cooler. And, again, that country boy engineering comes into place. We’ve rigged up 220 stacked heaters in there to make our refrigeration run more to pull that moisture out when we need to. And that pulls the humidity down to an acceptable level again. We leave them in that cooler, typically, at least two months—most of the time, three or four months. Then we take a long palette jack, lift those wooden racks up, and take them out into our aging space, where they finish out the aging process.

The average country ham that I sell down there is about nine months old. And we have hams that are much longer that we cure. I use my original family recipe on part of the hams that I make. That’s the ones that we salted down in that old log smokehouse there on our old place in Virginia. It was salt, brown sugar, and black and red pepper. And those are the hams that we make into what I call the country prosciutto.

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Back when my—when we were killing those hogs in Virginia, my grandparents wanted the biggest, fattest, heaviest hogs they could get. In fact, my grandfather was a country gentleman. He couldn’t read or write his own name. He never went to school but less than a week his entire life. He was raised isolated in those mountains. All the men knew was hard work. He was a large man, not like me. He was my mother’s father. He was about six [feet] four [inches] and weighed about 290 pounds. In his day, that was a giant. Today, it’s common. But in those days, he was just a mountain man’s mountain man, and he—if you went to visit him, you wouldn’t have been there fifteen minutes until he wanted to take you to his hog lot to show you how fat his hogs were. That was bragging rights in those mountains of Virginia.

Well the hogs that we’re raising today are much different, as you all are probably aware. The breeding practices kept getting them leaner and leaner and leaner. And finally, we’ve gotten them so lean, it’s a totally different product than I knew growing up. They’re harder to keep today. When I first went into the country ham business, I would only lose about one ham in 2,000. Now Albert Hicks couldn’t figure that out. I accomplished that while I was over in that old facility. He’d wallow that cigar around, and he’d say, “That’s the darn luckiest boy I ever saw. I don’t know how he does it.” [Laughter] Well what I was ding, I listened a lot to what he told me, but I was also listening to those guys at the University of Tennessee. When Albert started having spoilage problems, instead of backing off and dragging it out and taking his time and figuring out what was wrong, he would try to speed it up and get rid of them, which amplified his problem. He could never understand what I was doing, but I listened exactly to what the fellows in the university were telling me. I was losing about one ham in 2,000 because I was getting these hams really close to home. As time has passed, all the packinghouses have gone out of business. I dealt with Lay in east Tennessee in those days—in Knoxville, Tennessee. When they went out of business, I started buying from Valley Dale in Bristol. When they went out of business, I went to Voss Brothers in Nashville. When they went out of business, I went to Valley Dale—I meant to Real Foot [?] in west Tennessee. When they went out of business, there were no more in Tennessee, so I went to Louisville, Kentucky, Fisher Packing; that was the closest. When they went out of business, I could either go to eastern Carolina or the Midwest. And I tried the eastern Carolina pork about three or four times, and it was totally unsatisfactory for me. I just didn’t like it. So we’ve been buying out of the Midwest ever since. I’m now beginning to buy some certified Berkshire pork. And this is what a lot of the top chefs in the country are really singing the praises. They really like the pork loins out of those certified Berkshires. I’ve cured hams. I put my first cert—my first certified Berkshire hams in cure in February. I used my original family recipe. So it’s going to be at least next June before I can sample those hams to know what their like. I’ve made a lot of the certified Berkshire bacon. In fact, that maybe what I brought you. I just—I don’t know—I’ve got Berkshire bacon in stock. I don’t know if that’s it. But honestly, I can’t tell any difference in the Berkshire bacon and the other bacon bellies that I’m buying. I have no idea what breed of hogs I’m buying from these packers. But it’s almost a ninety-eight percent guarantee that they’re white hogs. Because that’s mostly what we’re raising in this country—raised in feedlots, very closely confined. Well the hogs that are coming out of the Iberian Peninsula in—in Europe, they’re raised running wild, eating acorns in the woods, and that’s why they’re so highly prized. And that’s why the price is so high. There’s a limited availability, of course, and it’s supposed to be better pork I’ve never had the privilege of looking at that pork, but I’m hopeful that I get to try it and find out.

After those hams start the aging process, I keep the regular ham until it’s nine months old. The prosciutto that I brought for you to sample tonight is out of a seventeen-month-old ham. My original family recipe, for some reason, when I’m mixing my original family recipe, I can never remember to put the nitrite in it. I’m getting old. [Laughter] It serves no purpose. If you were to buy prosciutto in Italy, it’s salt only. They don’t require nitrites. This—this ham coming out of the Iberian Peninsula in Spain, it won’t have nitrites. I’m too little to fight the battle with USDA. The university tells me I could probably prove I don’t need it. But I’m too small. It would cost me well into six figures to prove that I don’t have to put that nitrite, and I just can’t afford to take the time and effort to do that.

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When we fry ham at our house, I like to use—if I have a pot of coffee made, I will use about—depending on how much ham I’m frying—just two or three slices, I’ll use about a fourth of a cup of coffee—brewed coffee, not grounds—brewed coffee in my frying pan and a heaping tablespoon of brown sugar I sprinkle in there. Lay my slices on top of that. What that does, the brown sugar helps to take away the saltiness of the ham. It also tends to caramelize on the bottom of your frying pan, making it real easy to brown that ham without overcooking it. She’s going to cheat and use cola; we don’t have coffee and brown sugar, but we’ll substitute Coca-Cola—not Diet Coke. The kind with sugar in it.

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