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Salad

Curing Meats

A salt-based mixture used to cure ham and bacon.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 32% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,401 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Curing Meats

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Prepare a large wooden tray or shallow box for salting the meat.

  2. Mix the salt, saltpetre, sugar, red pepper, and baking soda together.

  3. Apply this mixture to each ham and shoulder of bacon.

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. Sugar + peppertop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,401 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Sugar and pepper barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 19,401 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

Coarse sea salt
Draws moisture out of the meat and seasons it through during curing.
Saltpetre
Converts to nitrite during curing, helping the meat keep its pink color.
Sugar
Balances the saltiness and adds mild sweetness to the cured meat.
Red pepper
Adds heat and aroma to the cure.

The step that matters

Applying the mixture to each piece. Salt and cure must reach every surface evenly. Uneven coverage leaves some areas under-cured, while others become overly salty and dry.

“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.

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