After all these years of enjoying Virginia ham, I just learned something yesterday that has me quite flummoxed!
It has to do with the color of ham.

OK. Slice a good Virginia ham, salted and smoked. Those slices are pink in color--sometimes nearly red, but not like raw meat, of course. Think of prosciutto. Nice and red, right? Or deep pink.

Now think about fresh pork. It's sort of pink, and then you bake it and it comes out whitish-beige or whitish-gray with perhaps a bit of a pink center, which is fine as long as the temperature is hot enough.

Here's my question:

Why doesn't ham turn whitish-beige in the smokehouse? Why does smoked ham retain its pink color that actually deepens to a deep pink or even a red while smoking?

Could it be that the temperature in the smoking process is never high enough to turn the pork whitish?

The reason I ask this is because my mother cooked a fresh ham yesterday, something rarely done here. And, of course, it turned out whitish-beige and tasted, as expected, like fresh pork. And that made me wonder about smoked ham and why it doesn't turn the same color as fresh ham.

I suspect it's the temperature difference in preparation, but would appreciate someone setting me straight. I'll bet of troy knows.