Name: On Curing Meats
Ingredients: 295 lb hams; 290 lb shoulders; 18 lb coarse sea salt; 44 lb sugar; 1 lb saltpeter; 1 lb boracic acid; 11 gallons water

Why it works: Ham and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 33% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,084 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓

On Curing Meats

Ingredients

Directions

Make the brine

Mix the salt, sugar, and saltpeter together.
Dissolve the boric acid in water.
Combine the mixture with the dissolved boric acid and water.

Cure the meat

Use this brine to cure the hams and shoulders.

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.

Ham + sugartop 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

Hams: The main meat, which absorbs the brine as it cures.
Shoulders: Additional meat cut that absorbs the brine during curing.
Coarse sea salt: Draws moisture out of the meat and seasons it while helping preserve it.
Sugar: Adds sweetness and balances the sharpness of the salt.
Saltpeter: Acts as a curing agent that helps preserve the meat and gives it a pink colour.

“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.