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Baking

To Bake Ham

A ham is soaked, dried, then baked with water or sherry wine, optionally covered with a dough paste.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Ham and sherry work together. They rank in the top 14% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 377 recipes. Both carry 4-ethyl-2-methoxyphenol, which smells smoky, clove. The science ↓

To Bake Ham

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the ham overnight and then wipe it dry.

  2. Place the ham in a turkey pan with a little water or sherry wine.

  3. Optionally, make a paste of dough and use it to cover the ham before baking.

Bake

  1. Cover the pan tightly to keep the steam in.

  2. Cook the ham for 3 to 4 hours, depending on its size.

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. Ham + sherrytop 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

Ham
Is the main cooked meat, and long gentle heat in a covered pan keeps it moist and tender.
Water or sherry wine
Adds moisture to the pan, so steam builds and keeps the ham from drying out.
Dough for paste
Forms a protective wrap that slows moisture loss from the ham during baking.

The step that matters

Cover the pan tightly. A tight cover traps steam around the ham, keeping the surface moist and the meat from drying out over the long cook.

“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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