MANSFIELD — Earlier this week I set about getting a ham for Easter. I had one important rule: no honey.
I went to see Chris Wilging of Wilging’s Meats on Lexington Avenue, partly to make sure I got exactly what I wanted, and partly to rant to him about this honey insanity.
Why would anyone take a delicious salty ham and befoul it with a sickening sweet glaze? It’s a form of madness, yet incredibly, I’m led to understand this is something of which a large number of people approve.
I’d never met Chris before, but like an old friend he calmed me down and talked me through how it worked.
“You might think you want just plain raw ham – fresh ham – and we’d sell it to you. But what you’d find is it tastes like pork.
“Ham needs to be cured with salt and sugar for a couple of weeks,” he explained.
“Sugar?” I asked, suspiciously.
“Yes, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to be sweet,” he assured me.
“After that it’s smoked, and at that point it’s fully cooked – you could eat it. But to bring out the flavor you need to cook it again yourself.”
Curing. Smoking. These were reassuringly savory words.
“So with honey ham,” I asked, “that gets added on afterwards?”
“Right,” said Chris. “Actually my brother-in-law worked for Honey Baked Ham in Columbus. It was his job to blowtorch the hams, one after the other. That’s how they do it, or at least they used to.”
Apparently this caramelizes the added sugar to make the sweet glaze. It makes me shudder just to think about it.
But never mind that. The important thing was I’d left Chris in no doubt about the kind of proper old-fashioned ham I was after, and I felt in safe hands as he selected one for me.
“All our meat is local,” he told me as he wrapped up my ham. “Beef from Boliantz farm out of Ashland. Pork from Heffelfinger’s. Never any antibiotics or hormones.”
“Here’s where things get confusing with my anti-sweet position on meat,” I said, returning inexorably to my main theme. “Barbecue. It’s sweet, yes – but it’s tangy sweet. And I’m OK with that.”
“Right,” said Chris, “the sauces. Of course a dry rub on barbecue is what’s all the rage now.”
“Is there a good kind of meat for barbecue?” I asked.
“Well, with the meat, it’s all about the cuts,” he explained. “Every cut has something it goes best with. With barbecue what’s popular is brisket for beef, shoulder for pork.”
“This is a silly question,” I said, “but what exactly is brisket?”
“No, no,” said Chris, “there are no silly questions. Brisket is the cut, from the lower part of the shoulder. Come on back to the meat cooler and I’ll show you.”
We stepped into the chill of the back room with its large slabs of hanging meat. Chris noticed I seemed a bit uneasy.
“Don’t worry, they won’t jump out at you,” he said.
“It’s not that,” I replied, nervously eyeing the heavy door that was creeping shut. “I’m worried about that locking us in.”
“Like on TV?” he said. “It’s OK. It doesn’t work that way. We won’t get stuck in here.”
After Chris had given me a quick lesson on the various cuts and what they were used for, we stepped back out into the warm and I asked a little about the history of Wilging’s.
“You’ve been around for almost 100 years, haven’t you?” I asked.
“That’s right,” said Chris, “we were started in 1919 by my great-grandfather, Philip Wilging. Back then our location was downtown at the 3rd Street Market.
“That place burned down in ‘68 or ‘69, something like that. Then we hopscotched around a couple of different places. We were at the corner of Walnut and 3rd. We’ve been at this location now for about 30 years.”
Did you start working here as a kid?
“Yeah,” said Chris, “but I wasn’t pushed into it. I went away to OU. But this is what I wanted to do.
“My parents (Philip and Jill Wilging) work here also.”
Do you have kids yourself?
“Yep, three. Do they work here? Well, you know, they’re 12, 6 and 6. They dabble a little. We’ve got the fifth generation of Wilgings stocking shelves.”
This is because Wilging’s is not just a meat counter. There are also several aisles of other goods and groceries.
“We’re not Kroger’s and we’re not trying to be,” said Chris, “but we’ve got some good all-natural products. Some wine and beer. And we have a ‘hot table’ so you can take home dinner. Meatloaf or a pot roast. We’ll do chicken, gravy and vegetables, a casserole.
“And we make our own sausage.”
I do love a bit of sausage. I asked what kind they made.
“Oh – salt and pepper, Italian, garlic. Bratwurst. Polish kielbasa and Cuban sausage. And there’s one I call ‘Autumn’ = I came up with it in the fall. That one has brown sugar and cinnamon.
“There are other different foodstuffs I’d like to stock, to have an even more varied lineup, but with certain products it’s a question of having the ethnic diversity to support it.
“We also have lamb,” he said, with a hint of a smile. “Not a whole lot of it around, you know. But we always have fresh lamb here.”
Although I didn’t ask, I think perhaps Chris knew that as an Englishman I would be partial to lamb.
If so, he was right. I’ll be making a return trip to Wilging’s soon so I can take some home. It’s delicious with a bit of mint sauce.
Have a very happy Easter folks, and enjoy your ham = whether it be honeyed or not.
Wilging’s Meats is located at 1391 Lexington Avenue, Mansfield. They’re open weekdays from 8 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., Saturday from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., and closed on Sunday and Wednesday.
Find them online at http://wilgingmeats.com/ and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/Wilging-Meats-241800825906437/.
