Skip to main content
Main

Baked Ham

A ham soaked, scrubbed, and baked with a flour paste.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Ham and flour are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 33% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,516 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓

Baked Ham

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Soak the ham for 12 hours.

  2. Scrub and trim away any rusty parts from the underside and edges.

  3. Wipe the ham very dry.

  4. Make a paste with flour and hot water, and cover the ham with it.

Bake and finish

  1. Place the ham in a dripping pan with enough water to prevent burning.

  2. Bake for 5 hours or 25 minutes per pound.

  3. Baste occasionally to prevent the crust from cracking.

  4. Once done, remove the paste and skin.

  5. Let it cool before removing the skin for better juice preservation.

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 + flourtop 33% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together2,516 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, which cooks slowly in the oven until tender and heated through.
Flour
Forms a paste crust that shields the ham's surface and helps trap moisture during the long bake.

The step that matters

Basting the crust during the bake. A long bake can dry and crack the flour paste crust. Cracks let moisture escape from the meat, so basting occasionally helps keep the crust intact and the ham juicy.

“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

with Apples 3 See all 159 →

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes