Ham shank

Hi all

I'm hoping for a bit of a sanity check. When I was young, an occasional treat was a lump of ham on the bone, sort of like an oversized chicken drumstick but ham. I remember this as ham shank.

Thing is, I'm craving one, and have been for a while now. But in Tesco I see lamb shank, and when I Google ham shank I get ham hock, which doesn't look like what I remember from my youth.

Am I misremembering, or is there such thing as ham shank that was a popular cheap and delicious often ready cooked chunk of meat from the butcher's shop?

Maybe it's gone down the route of chitterlings and faggots, once a thing, now largely consigned to history?

 

I get Ham/Gammon shanks from my butcher or Morrisons, need to be cooked I generally pressure cook them. Supply can be erratic. Good with parsley sauce and fresh broad beans.
Difference with Ham hock from Google search:
Is ham shank same as ham hock?
Ham hocks tend to be bonier and have less meat on them because they come from the area of the leg that is closest to the foot of the pig. Ham shanks, on the other hand, are meatier because they come from the area just below the shoulder or the hip.
I think there is some confusion these days.
Yes I do remember the Pork butcher having cooked shanks in the window, also pork pies, sausage rolls, hams, brawn, cooked chaps, cooked lower jaws in halves with teeth, trotters etc

 

Probably still available but they take the bone out, cut off the slightest bit of fat that the pig had been allowed to grow and generally turned it into a manufactured piece of unrecognisable plastic.

Like they do with most stuff these days.

 

Pigs have been bred to be a lot leaner these days. I have discussed with local butcher the paucity of dripping from a modern pork joint; also most butchers these days can't score the rind for toffee' I do it myself to get good crackling.

 

Personally I think sheep and pigs are slaughtered too young.
Anything for a quick buck, beats feeding them.
The bloke i know who I get a Christmas Turkey from sells hoggin , basically a lamb that has been allowed to live just a bit longer
Never tried it because he is only a one family business and really small, it all gets ordered well in advance.

 

I would go to see our local butcher. Except he decided to retire as soon as covid came along. He was a proper old school butcher, really nice man, very friendly, yet massive, and strangely slightly terrifying. He knew his stuff.

He handed the shop over to his son. He's a nice enough lad, but somehow not strangely terrifying, perhaps because he doesn't smile at you while holding a massive great meat cleaver. He knows plenty about selling pre packed frozen things but sadly not so much about meat.

When his dad ran the shop you couldn't just nip straight in and out even if you knew what you wanted, cos he'd passionately talk about how beautiful a lump of meat was and a million different ways to cook it. Shame he retired, but I guess everyone deserves to chill out at some point.