Skip to main content
Main

Ham Casserole

A casserole of ham baked with milk, jelly, and flour, finished with candied sweet potatoes.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 5 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Flour and sweet potato work together. They rank in the top 9% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 627 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Ham Casserole

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 300°F (150°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Soak the ham slice in milk for 1 hour.

  2. Place the ham in a casserole and pour milk over it.

Bake and finish

  1. Cover and bake in a 300°F (150°C) oven for 1 hour, trimming off excess fat.

  2. Twenty minutes before it is done, spread jelly over the ham.

  3. Add more milk to create gravy, uncover, and let it brown slowly.

  4. Thicken the gravy with flour and garnish with candied sweet potatoes.

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. Flour + sweet potatotop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together627 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Milk + flourtop 14% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together78,219 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Milk + sweet potatotop 15% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together596 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-heptenal (creamy, biscuit).

  4. Ham + milktop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together1,089 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

  5. Ham + sweet potatotop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together19 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-ol (mushroom, earthy).

Milk and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 78,219 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Ham
Provides the main meat, and its fat flavours the gravy as it cooks.
Milk
Supplies moisture and forms the base of the gravy.
Jelly
Its sugars caramelise and darken the surface of the ham.
Flour
Thickens the liquid into a gravy as it heats.

The step that matters

Spreading the jelly 20 minutes before the end. Jelly is mostly sugar, which darkens quickly in oven heat. Adding it too early lets it scorch before the ham is done, while adding it near the end gives an even glaze that browns slowly without burning.

Swap the sweet potato

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (ham, milk, flour):

  1. Arrowrootfits better
  2. Shallotfits better
  3. Potatofits better
  4. Sweet potatothe original

Fit is the average pairing score against ham, milk, flour. 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.

You might also like

Sweet Potato CroquettesSweet Potato Croquettes53 recipesPotato CroquettesPotato Croquettes255 recipesPotato RollsPotato Rolls78 recipesRoasted Sweet PotatoesRoasted Sweet Potatoes62 recipes