Name: Westphalia Hams
Ingredients: 100 parts water; ½ cup coarse sea salt; ¼ cup brown sugar; 1 tablespoon Barbadoes tar; 1 tablespoon spirits of wine; 3 tablespoons of the mixture; saltpetre (as needed to cure the ham)

Why it works: Spirit and wine work together. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 701 recipes. Both carry isoamyl acetate, which smells banana, fruity. The science ↓

Westphalia Hams

Ingredients

Directions

Make the cure

Dissolve the salt, brown sugar, Barbadoes tar, and spirits of wine in the water. Mix well and let it stand for several days.

Cure the ham

Take 3 tablespoons of the mixture and rub it into the ham along with the necessary saltpetre.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

Spirit + winetop 9% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together701 recipes

Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, fruity).
Sugar + spirittop 25% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together602 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).
Wine + hamtop 27% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together303 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).
Sugar + winetop 31% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together9,581 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).
Sugar + hamtop 33% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together1,084 recipes

Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Coarse sea salt: Draws moisture out of the meat and helps preserve it during curing.
Brown sugar: Adds sweetness and balances the saltiness of the cure.
Saltpetre: Helps preserve the meat and keeps it pink during curing.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.