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Shredded Ham with Currant Jelly Sauce

A sauce of butter, currant jelly, cayenne, and sherry wine served over shredded ham.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
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Why it works: Currant and sherry work together. They rank in the top 11% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 393 recipes. Both carry ethyl cinnamate, which smells sweet, balsamic. The science ↓

Shredded Ham with Currant Jelly Sauce

Ingredients

Directions

  1. In a chafing dish, combine the butter and currant jelly.

  2. Heat until melted, then add cayenne, sherry wine, and ham.

  3. Simmer for 5 minutes.

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. Currant + sherrytop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together393 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  2. Butter + winetop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,645 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-furfurylthiol (coffee, roasted).

  3. Butter + sherrytop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,505 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  4. Currant + winetop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,323 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl cinnamate (sweet, balsamic).

  5. Sherry + hamtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together377 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-ethyl-2-methoxyphenol (smoky, clove).

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

What each ingredient does

Butter
Adds richness and a smooth, glossy body to the sauce.
Currant jelly
Supplies sweetness and fruity flavour, and thickens the sauce as it melts and reduces.
Sherry wine
Adds acidity and aroma that balance the sweetness of the jelly.
Cold cooked ham
Provides the savoury meat that the warm sauce coats and heats through.

The step that matters

Heat until melted. Currant jelly is mostly sugar, and sugar scorches easily over direct heat. Melting the butter and jelly gently over low heat keeps the sauce smooth and prevents it from burning or turning bitter before the sherry is added.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, pepper, sherry, wine, ham):

  1. Grapefits better
  2. Pineapplefits better
  3. Applefits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, pepper, sherry, wine, ham. 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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