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Hams and Bacon

This recipe uses saltpetre.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
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Why it works: Wine and beer work together. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 89 recipes. Both carry 4-mercapto-4-methylpentan-2-one, which smells catty, blackcurrant. The science ↓

Hams and Bacon

Ingredients

Directions

  1. Prepare a brine with equal parts salt, saltpetre, wine lees, and water.

  2. Infuse savoury herbs in the brine.

  3. Soak the hams in the brine for one month.

  4. After soaking, drain the hams and smoke them.

  5. Rub the smoked hams with vinegar and wine.

  6. Optionally, mix spices into the brine and use strong beer, oak chips, and juniper for flavor.

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. Wine + beertop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together89 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-mercapto-4-methylpentan-2-one (catty, blackcurrant).

  2. Wine + vinegartop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,493 recipes

    Shared aroma: sotolon (curry, maple).

  3. Vinegar + beertop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together302 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, fruity).

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

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