Name: Potted Ham
Ingredients: well-cooked ham; cayenne pepper; broth from cooking the ham

Why it works: Ham and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 23% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,058 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Potted Ham

Ingredients

well-cooked ham
cayenne pepper
broth from cooking the ham

Directions

Prepare

Pass the well-cooked ham through a meat grinder.
Add a little cayenne pepper and some of the broth in which the ham was cooked. Mix into a stiff paste.

Pack and sterilize

Pack the mixture into jars.
Sterilize the jars using the intermittent method.

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.

Photo for illustrative purposes only · Contact us to use it

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 + peppertop 23% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together6,058 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Well-cooked ham: Forms the bulk of the paste, giving it its meaty flavor and body.
Broth from cooking the ham: Adds moisture so the ground ham can be mixed into a spreadable paste.

“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.