Growing up, a ham dinner was made with a five-pound canned ham. (Dad would score the top, put a whole clove in each intersection, and then cover it with orange marmalade.) Do they make five-pound canned hams anymore? Just looking on Amazon, I only see one-pound ones. [Full disclosure: I make spiral-cut, bone-in hams. Just wondering about the canned hams for nostalgia’s sake.]
Right-clicking your question “Do they make five-pound canned hams anymore?” and choosing “web search”, I get
I bought a couple of one pound canned hams a while back and it was a barely solid glob of watery ham paste. Sub-Spam/Treet quality, repulsive texture, made only marginally edible by cooking until firm-ish. I’m not sure if you would be able to find a good, 30-year-ago quality canned ham.
Were they better or did we just have worse palates? I’ve turned into a horrendous ham snob in my middle age and overpay for the good (or at least better) stuff. But before I was quite so bad, remembering the old canned hams of my youth I tried one maybe a decade or so ago and had about the same experience as you. Which made me wonder if they had always sucked and I just couldn’t tell the difference when I was sixteen or whatever.
I did what you did, and entered my ZIP code. Not available here. I asked if Kroger-owned Fred Meyer sells them, and they don’t. I asked ‘can i order 5-pounds hormel black label ham?’ Yes! I clicked the link to Kroger that was provided. It came up with a page, but it’s unavailable.
When I was a kid, ham came in cans. That’s all there was, and it was good. But as I said, I buy spiral-cut, real ham on the bone; not because the 5-pound canned hams are unavailable (here, apparently), but because I prefer natural meat to chopped-and-formed loafs made from bits.
Just FYI, the trick to making a grocery store ham (not canned) even better is to smoke it again.
I have no idea why this thread interested me so much. I spent 30 minutes trying to make it work, and getting a LOT of (wrong) answers from various AI search engines. IE it lied to me about five times and when I exhausted all the options, I asked “why?”. The final answer per the free, browser based Gemini:
Large 5 lb. pear-shaped canned hams (including Hormel and Dubuque) are now strictly managed by regional brick-and-mortar grocery chains. Because they require temperature-stable handling and are incredibly heavy for standard mail, stores like Sam’s Club, Walmart, and regional chains have completely restricted them to local pickup or localized delivery vans. They will not put them in a FedEx, UPS, or USPS box. [1, 2, 3, 4]
And even then, I think it’s wrong. While a 48oz Hormel offering comes up on Walmart, if you try to order, it says “We Couldn’t Find this Page” and offers zero “similar” suggestions!
A longshot seems to be Tony’s Fresh Market, a smaller Illinois chain:
That swears they have the Dubuque 5lb can in stock (physical locations) and available for local delivery. You could check with a local SDMB member, and ask them to confirm if it exists. At which point, I suspect you’d be in for a road trip, or pay said board member to pack it carefully and ship it to you at probably usurious rates, given what I paid to mail my Dad a care package of home baked cookies last year (over $50 USD for under 2lbs with 2 day shipping that took 4!)…
But given all the difficulties, triple down on asking a local 'doper about said claims, because I no longer believe.
Big, five lb canned hams are widely available at regional+ sized grocers. They last forever and are mostly bought seasonal so might be hard to find inside the store, tucked back in under the pie crusts or ground beef chubs. They might be closer to the deli or take&bake pizza display than the butcher.
Edit: When I get in the mood, the canned ONE pound hams are almost perfect, no week of salty regret.
This is just my opinion, but I feel like they’ve been replaced by those packaged boneless, spiral cut, pre glazed hams you can buy now.
At walmart they have either a gold or purple packaging and are sold in the meat department.
Hehe, their ability to last is amazing. Back when I worked at Kroger in the 80s the first product I saw that had its label bleached out by the lights to where it no longer had any red in it was a canned ham in the refrigerated section. It was still within its expiration date, but the can looked ancient.
I’ve noticed that the canned foods with the longest Use-By lives seem to be substantially meat in content. These canned hams, imported South American beef, Vienna sausages, kippered herring, hash might be good for 5 years but green beans for two.
I can picture those off season hams, dented, faded, fuzzy with contact-acquired price labels, dairy leaks, onion skins & reefer dust bunnies. I think they might be behind the buckets of hog livers or over by the cheesecakes.
What seasonality do you associate with canned hams? I’m not disagreeing, merely curious.
I’ve always bought the ones in heavy shrink wrap and at least for me, hams are a year-round food. Not often, but not part of any particular season.
Are canned hams ever as good as the more expensive, spiral-cut baked hams?
Are Jack In The Box tacos as good as street tacos?
This must have happened at different times in different parts of the US. I remember those packaged, spiral cut hams from when I was a kid back in the 80s (around Corpus Christi TX). Here’s what I recall the ham that we always cooked for Christmas dinner looking like.
It looks the same today as it did 40 years ago.
Clever. I love(d) the old cat meat JitB Monster Tacos as the abominations they are/were. There is/was something hideously satisfying about those deep-fried fast-food creations even though a genuine street taco nominally outshines then 100-1 
.
I’m not going to put them in the same category as the canned ham I last tried though. Not for me.
Dad was the ham-maker, and he always used the 5-pound canned hams. H died in 1998, and I moved out in 1987. So it’s been over 40 years since I had one of his hams… and I haven’t had a canned ham since. In my (imperfect) memory, the chopped-and-formed ham tasted good (along with the potatoes au gratin out off a box). I do remember ‘gristley’ bits. As I said, I reheat the spiral-cut, bone-in hams nowadays. I might get a 1-pound canned ham and try the scored/cloved/marmaladed dad recipe in miniature. But I think the dimensions were part of it.
That’s definitely my memory as well. But yeah, I have become disenchanted with my imperfect memory. Some thing are the same - the Kraft macaroni and cheese of my youth tastes pretty much identical to me today. I don’t eat that junk often, but I probably revisit it at least once a year (maybe two), because nostalgia.
But I also remember adoring the cheeseburger version of Hamburger Helper as even a teenager. I tried it again several years back. Nope - it was a big old fail for me. SpaghettiOs? Yee-uck. Chef Boyardee ravioli? I mean not…great. Barely good, but also nowhere near as repulsive as the SpaghettiOs I once treasured. So a pretty mixed bag.
But I think you should absolutely give it a try. Worst case scenario, it will probably be fine chopped up in a pea soup or something. Best case? Delicious and a flood of warming childhood nostalgia. Can’t put a price on that 
.
Perhaps the old Colbert Report “Ham Rove” character killed the 5 lbs. canned ham. 