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Boneless Ham Butts

Cures boneless ham butts with salt, sugar, saltpetre, spices, then stuffs and ages.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Cinnamon and cardamom match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,299 recipes. Both carry beta-phellandrene, which smells minty, terpene. The science ↓

Boneless Ham Butts

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare and cure

  1. Trim the ham butts free of fat and bone.

  2. Rub the meat with the salt, sugar, saltpetre, red pepper, pimento, cinnamon, and cardamom.

  3. Pack the meat tightly in a container and let it cure for 40 to 50 days.

Stuff and store

  1. After curing, stuff the meat into beef casings using a stuffer.

  2. Add 2¼ ounces of red pepper and 1¼ ounces each of pimento, cinnamon, and cardamom during stuffing.

  3. Store the stuffed meat in a dry room at 50°F (10°C) for 60 days.

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. Cinnamon + cardamomtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,299 recipes

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

  2. Pepper + cardamomtop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together832 recipes

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

  3. Pepper + cinnamontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,890 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyl cinnamate (strawberry).

  4. Sugar + cinnamontop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together30,779 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

  5. Sugar + cardamomtop 19% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,044 recipes

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

Sugar and cinnamon barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 30,779 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

Ham butts
Provide the lean meat that is cured and later stuffed into casings.
Coarse sea salt
Draws out moisture and seasons the meat during curing, helping preserve it.
Sugar
Balances the salt and adds sweetness to the cured flavour.
Saltpetre
Helps the cured meat keep its colour and adds to preservation during long curing.

The step that matters

Packing the meat tightly during the cure. Tight packing keeps the salt and spices in even contact with all the meat so the cure penetrates uniformly. Uneven contact can leave spoilage-prone areas under-salted during the long 40 to 50 day cure.

Swap the cardamom

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

  1. Clovefits better
  2. Nutmegfits better
  3. Allspicefits better
  4. Cardamomthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against ham, sugar, pepper, cinnamon. 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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