I cherish my friends — they happily venture to new restaurants with me, try my recipe creations and gift my family with food. Our Dallas friends took us to their favorite spot for hearty barbecue and incredibly delicate biscuits. Recently, they sent us a hickory smoked ham from New Braunfels Smokehouse outside San Antonio. Their gift makes a great meal for a crowd, with plenty of leftovers.

I generally prefer all the dishes I can make from bits and pieces of ham, but first, let’s start with serving a beautiful roast ham for Easter dinner. To accompany the ham, a cherry chutney, spiked with a glug of bourbon, will please my cocktail-loving crowd.

A ham comes from the upper hip portion and rear legs of a pig. A whole ham means it’s both the shank end, which narrows near the foot, and the wide butt end. A fresh ham is just that — pork with no cure, no smoke. Season a fresh ham as you would a pork roast and cook it to an internal temperature of 160 degrees.

Our pink and juicy Texas gift ham, and indeed most hams sold in supermarkets and butcher shops across the United States, falls into the category of city ham. These are hams that are injected with a wet cure before hot-smoking, which fully cooks them.

These fully cooked hams take center stage at many holiday meals because they are lean, moist and relatively inexpensive per serving. Most supermarkets sell butt end (tender, but more tricky to carve) and shank end (easier to carve, but often drier) portions of fully cooked ham weighing about 8 pounds — plenty for a gathering of 10 to 12 guests.

Serving a whole, or portion of, a city ham proves simple — you only need to gently warm the lean meat. Most fully cooked hams simply require a low oven with something added to the pan to provide a moist environment.

Calculate 12 to 15 minutes per pound in a 325-degree oven to sufficiently heat a fully cooked ham. I like to wrap the ham in heavy-duty foil and add 1 cup of water (or half water and half beer) to the pan to keep things moist when heating.

I’m not a big fan of sweet glazes and pineapple slices covering up the delicious flavor of the smoked meat. Instead, I offer tangy, bold mustards, pickles, relishes and chutneys on the side to complement the meat. This triple cherry chutney boasts a bit of bourbon and mustard to counter the fruits’ sweet nature.