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Recipes for Minced Ham

A smoked and cooked mixture of ground pork and beef seasoned with salt and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Pork and beef match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 5,690 recipes. Both carry 12-methyltridecanal, which smells tallowy, beefy. The science ↓

Recipes for Minced Ham

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the meat

  1. Grind the beef trimmings through a 7/64-inch plate.

  2. Chop the ground beef finely, adding 5 lbs of water for every 100 lbs of meat.

  3. Add the whole pork pieces.

  4. Stuff the mixture into beef bung casings.

Smoke and cook

  1. Smoke for 4 hours at 120°F to 160°F (49°C to 71°C).

  2. Cook for 2.5 to 3 hours at 160°F (71°C).

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. Pork + beeftop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together5,690 recipes

    Shared aroma: 12-methyltridecanal (tallowy, beefy).

  2. Pork + meattop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,208 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  3. Beef + meattop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,533 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

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

What each ingredient does

Dry-cured large lean pork pieces
Provide lean meat that gives the minced ham its bite and body.
Dry-cured beef trimmings
Add fat and flavor, helping the mixture stay moist and cohesive.
Water
Adds moisture to the chopped meat, keeping the finished texture juicy.

The step that matters

Chopping the ground beef with water. Water added during chopping helps the meat emulsify and hold moisture, so the finished product stays juicy rather than dry and crumbly.

“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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