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Boiled and Baked Ham

A ham boiled until tender, then coated with egg white, sugar or bread crumbs, and baked until browned.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
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Why it works: Ham and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,526 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Boiled and Baked Ham

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Boil the ham until tender.

  2. Cover the ham with the egg white.

  3. Sprinkle sugar or bread crumbs over the ham.

Bake and brown

  1. Place the ham in a 400°F (200°C) oven.

  2. Brown the ham.

  3. Cover the ham with cake icing (variation).

  4. Brown the ham (variation).

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 + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,526 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

  3. Ham + sugartop 33% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,084 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

What each ingredient does

Ham
The main cut, cooked first until tender, then finished with a browned crust.
Egg white
Acts as a sticky binder so the sugar or crumbs adhere to the ham's surface.
Sugar or bread crumbs
Sugar caramelizes and browns in the oven, while crumbs form a crisp, golden crust.

The step that matters

Brown the ham. Sugar darkens quickly under oven heat, so the coating can scorch before it looks properly browned. Watch the surface closely and check it often near the end of baking.

“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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