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To Prepare Decorated Ham

A smoked ham is decorated with lard, jelly, laurel leaves, lemon slices, and a colored paper cuff.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Laurel and lemon are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 10% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,239 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

To Prepare Decorated Ham

Ingredients

Directions

Cook and trim

  1. Cook the ham and let it cool.

  2. Trim the ham nicely around the edges and uncover the bone.

Decorate

  1. Cut small squares into the skin around the front part of the ham.

  2. Fill the squares with white lard and smooth it with a knife.

  3. Carve a star shape from the jelly and place it on the ham.

  4. Add additional jelly to create a diamond pattern and place it around the star.

  5. Decorate with laurel leaves and lemon slices.

  6. Use lard to create fancy designs on the empty skin areas.

  7. Wrap a colored paper cuff around the bone.

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. Laurel + lemontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,239 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

  2. Ham + laureltop 27% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together609 recipes

    Shared aroma: anethole (sweet, anise).

  3. Ham + lemontop 29% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,788 recipes

    Shared aroma: decanal (soap, orange peel).

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

What each ingredient does

Smoked ham
Forms the main body of the dish and carries all the decoration.
White lard
Fills the scored squares and designs, giving a white, opaque contrast against the skin.
Jelly
Forms the star and diamond shapes, setting firm to hold its carved pattern on the ham.

Swap the lemon

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

  1. Red currantfits about as well
  2. Lemonthe original
  3. Orangefits less well
  4. Applefits less well

Fit is the average pairing score against ham, laurel. 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.

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