1 What I was trying to get at here, is that the experience of bacon curers using nitrite and ascorbate suggests that the ascorbate reduction of nitrite is not dominant, maybe the ascorbate only mops up excess nitrite? We don't know enough about the respective reactions to make a call on that.
I agree with you re the use of ascorbate and air dried hams, though since a number of the dry cure recipes use two applications of cure a couple of weeks apart, maybe an addition of ascorbate to the second application might be a viable option. In any event the nitrAte curing might be the more important for longer cured hams.
2 We will probably have to agree to disagree on nitrosamines. I tend to take a naturally sceptical view of food scares and animal lab testing studies.
3 Fair enough. I just wonder whether 'internal' oxygen is substantially less dominant than surface oxygen available in the air.
Despite a lot of interesting speculation I'm not sure whether we've added much to the practical body of knowledge on the issue of curing
maybe we are expecting too much. If the EFSA, don't know in detail, how or why curing with nitrites work, there's little chance we can, authoritatively fill in the gaps.For my own part, I will:
continue to focus on basic hygiene practices,
adhere to the maximum ingoing EU limits for nitrItes/nitrAtes,
buy some ascorbate to use in short term cures,
keep my fingers crossed that all this works, and finally,
bin anything that looks and smells dodgy
. 
