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Beep Ham

A cured beef product seasoned with salt, saltpetre, sugar, spices, and left to cure for 16 days.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,686 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Beep Ham

Ingredients

Directions

Cure

  1. Rub a little coarse sea salt over the beef.

  2. Remove the bone from the beef.

  3. After 1 or 2 days, rub the saltpetre, brown sugar, coarse sea salt, white pepper, cloves, and nutmeg into the beef.

  4. Strew ½ cup of coarse sea salt over the beef.

  5. Let it sit for 16 days, turning it daily.

Finish

  1. After 16 days, hang it up or boil it.

  2. Allow it to cool in the water in which it was boiled.

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. Clove + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. White pepper + nutmegtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,375 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Beef + nutmegtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,495 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Beef + clovetop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Sugar + nutmegtop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together23,364 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Sugar and nutmeg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 23,364 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

Saltpetre
Acts as a curing agent that preserves the meat and gives it a pink colour.
Coarse sea salt
Draws out moisture and seasons the meat while helping to preserve it.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the harshness of the salt.
Cloves
Adds warm, aromatic flavour to the cured meat.
Nutmeg
Adds warm, aromatic flavour to the cured meat.
White pepper
Adds mild, sharp spice to the cure.

The step that matters

Let it sit for 16 days, turning it daily. Salt and curing agents penetrate the meat slowly from the surface inward. Turning it daily spreads the cure evenly, so the meat is preserved and seasoned throughout rather than unevenly at the edges.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, sugar, clove, nutmeg):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Allspicefits better
  3. Cardamomfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, sugar, clove, nutmeg. 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.

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