Ham is the main dish that people all over the world cook and eat for the Easter Holidays and for other large family gatherings. Cooking Easter ham is a tradition in many family's. The custom of cooking ham at Easter seems to go back as far as William the Conqueror. You can use a whole, bone-in ham, score it and stick in a few cloves, maybe put on a paste of some brown sugar and mustard, then seal it all in bread dough and bake it. But there are many recipes you can use for cooking your Easter ham.

Cooking Easter ham is a simple main course to prepare and cook, but cooking ham seems to be something that a lot of people fear as they are afraid they will ruin it. The high price of a nice sized ham is probably the reason for the entire fuss over cooking ham, family gatherings are sometimes stressful and when you have the chance of ruining dinner it ads to the tension. There are many reasons to start cooking ham according to the directions, but cooking your Easter ham from a nice recipe is most of the time a better choice because that can ad more flavor.

Create your own experience

If you don't have a lot of experience in cooking ham, you may want to practice a little before the big Easter meal. There are many different recipes on the Internet and in cooking books waiting for you to try. When you start well in advance You can buy some very small hams for little money each so that you can experiment with different recipes to see which one you like the best and which one is the easiest for you to make. This way you will end up serving your guests the best cooked Easter ham they have ever had.

Family recipes for cooking Easter ham

Traditional recipes can also be found very close by, and your own family is usually a good source for them, so speak to your family members to see what there favorite recipes are for cooking Easter ham. Maybe there is a recipe that has been passed down and used in the family for generations and you may want to try your luck at that.

Cooking Easter ham does not need to be stressful and to help relax you a little; there are certain things that are traditionally added in a lot of family's when cooking Easter ham.

• Use beer to baste the ham in. Adding beer gives it a very moist taste but don't worry, you will not taste the beer nor end up drunk from it.

• Spread and smother brown sugar on the top and the sides of the ham. This will add just the right amount of sweetness when cooking ham.

• Put pineapple slices on top. When finishing up, you could try placing a few pineapple slices on top of the ham and hold them down with tiny little toothpicks. This also helps with flavor and a lot of people tend to like eating the ham-flavored pineapple.

• And last but not least use Cola to baste the ham in. Adding Cola is a sort of combination between beer and brown sugar, it gives a very moist sweet taste to your wonderful cooked Easter ham

So you see there is no reason to be afraid to start cooking a ham for Easter. Just give it a try and as stated above do a few test runs with smaller hams, this way you can master the fine art of cooking an Easter ham.