Name: To Boil a Stuffed Ham
Ingredients: 1 ham; mint, chopped fine

Why it works: Ham and mint work together. They rank in the top 32% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 54 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

To Boil a Stuffed Ham

Ingredients

1 ham
mint, chopped fine

Directions

Make incisions in the ham with a knife.
Fill the incisions with chopped mint.
Boil the ham for 5 to 6 hours.
Trim the ham, but do not skin it.

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.

Ham + minttop 32% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together54 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

Ham: Serves as the main cut of meat, cooked through by long boiling to become tender.
Mint: Adds a fresh, aromatic flavour that is carried into the ham through the incisions.

“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.