Skip to main content
Main

Boiled and Baked Ham

A ham boiled then baked, coated with raw egg white and sugar or bread crumbs, optionally finished with cake icing.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
Jump to recipe ↓

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 the ham

  1. Boil the ham until tender.

  2. Cover the ham with the white of a raw egg.

  3. Sprinkle sugar or bread crumbs over the ham.

Bake and serve

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

  2. For a variation, cover with cake icing and brown.

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
Main cooked meat, made tender by boiling before the final browning in the oven.
Raw egg white
Binds the sugar or crumbs to the surface so they stay in place while browning.
Sugar or bread crumbs
Forms a crust that browns in the oven, adding sweetness and texture to the surface.

The step that matters

Browning the ham in the oven. Sugar and proteins brown and caramelise only at high dry heat. The coating can burn if left too long, so watch it closely while it browns.

“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.

More baked ham recipes

You might also like