Skip to main content
Main

To Cure Hams

A method for curing hams using salt, sugar, spices, and smoking.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Mace and clove are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,400 recipes. Both carry methyleugenol, which smells clove, spice. The science ↓

To Cure Hams

Ingredients

Directions

Cure

  1. Mix all ingredients together and rub thoroughly into the hams.

  2. Pack the hams in a cask or tub with the skin side down.

  3. After three weeks, change the top layer to the bottom.

  4. Let the hams lie in pickle for six to seven weeks.

Wash and smoke

  1. Wash the hams and wipe them dry.

  2. Hang the hams up to smoke for one to two weeks, or up to three months.

  3. If using a brine, let the hams remain in it for four to six weeks.

  4. To smoke without a smokehouse, suspend hams from a board across a hogshead.

  5. Make a fire in an old tin or iron pan using corn cobs, green hickory, or oak chips.

  6. Cover the hogshead with old quilts and carpets to retain smoke and control heat.

  7. Renew the fire daily, ensuring it smolders without heating the meat.

Store

  1. When thoroughly cured, sew each ham in a thick cotton bag and hang in a cool, dry place.

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.

  1. Mace + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  2. Ham + clovetop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,666 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-decalactone (peach, creamy).

  3. Ham + macetop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,050 recipes
  4. Sugar + clovetop 26% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together17,182 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

  5. Ham + sugartop 33% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,084 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Sugar and clove barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 17,182 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Hams
Provide the meat that is cured, pickled and smoked into the finished product.
Fine salt
Draws moisture out of the meat and preserves it during the cure.
Brown sugar
Balances the salt with sweetness and adds flavour to the cure.
Saltpetre
Helps the meat keep its pink colour and inhibits spoilage during curing.

The step that matters

Renewing the smoking fire. The fire must smolder, not burn hot, so smoke flavours the meat without cooking it or drying the surface too fast. Too much heat makes the hams cook instead of cure.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (ham, sugar, clove):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Allspicefits better
  3. Nutmegfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against ham, sugar, clove. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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.

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes