Happily, the home ham picture began to brighten a few years ago. I recently tasted dry-cured hams from Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee and Iowa, and some rival Europe’s best. Their makers are variously determined to revive country ham and to develop American versions of European classics. They have made significant progress by rediscovering the ingredients that made dry-cured ham so good in the first place, when pigs were fattened on the autumn harvest and their meat preserved for scarcer times.

Image ADD SALT S. Wallace Edwards & Sons sells ham in Virginia. Credit... Jay Paul for The New York Times

Above all there’s the pig, which should be mature, well fed and free to run around. Muscles of such an animal are packed with the raw materials for creating flavor, enzymes that will catalyze the first stage of that creation, and fat to lend tenderness and moistness.

Then there’s time. It takes many months for muscle enzymes to break down flavorless proteins into savory amino acids, odorless fats into aromatic fragments, and for all these chemical bits and pieces to interact and generate new layers of flavor. And it takes months for meat to lose moisture and develop a density of flavor and texture.

A century ago, American country ham makers had the pigs and took the time. A Virginian named Samuel Wallace Edwards once wrote that when he began his career in 1910, he worked with mature hogs “that roamed the woods and fields of southern Virginia, gleaning the acorns, roots, peanuts and corn” after the fall harvest. After a salting in the winter and cold-smoking in the spring, the hams hung for up to a year in wood buildings that were as hot or cold as the weather outside. Summer temperatures reached the 90s and accelerated the chemical reactions that create flavor.

But by 1962, when Mr. Edwards penned his recollection, in the local newspaper, most hogs were confined, fed growth-stimulating antibiotics and slaughtered at a young 5 or 6 months, all in the name of “progress, speed and the American dollar.” Now most country hams are made from confined fast-growing pigs, cured for not much longer than the legal minimum of 70 days, and just aren’t very flavorful.