Name: To Smoke a Mutton Ham
Ingredients: 1 leg of mutton; ½ pound coarse sea salt; ½ pound table salt; ½ pound brown sugar; 2 ounces powdered saltpetre; handful of dry salt

Why it works: Mutton and sugar work together. They rank in the top 34% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 726 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

To Smoke a Mutton Ham

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the ham

Trim the leg of mutton into the shape of a ham and let it hang for 2 days.
In a thick saucepan, heat the coarse sea salt, table salt, brown sugar, and powdered saltpetre until warm.
Rub the warm mixture thoroughly into the ham.

Cure

Place the ham in a wooden or earthen vessel and let it stand for 4 days, turning it daily.
On the fourth day, rub a handful of dry salt over the ham and let it stand for 2 more days.

Dry and smoke

Afterward, dry the ham and hang it in wood smoke for 1 week.

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.

Mutton + sugartop 34% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together726 recipes

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

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

What each ingredient does

Leg of mutton: Forms the meat that is salted, cured and smoked into the ham.
Coarse sea salt: Draws moisture out of the meat and seasons it during curing.
Table salt: Draws moisture out of the meat and seasons it during curing.
Brown sugar: Adds sweetness and balances the salt in the cure.
Powdered saltpetre: Helps preserve the meat and gives the cured ham its colour.

The step that matters

Rubbing the warm cure thoroughly into the ham. Salt and curing agents only preserve the meat where they reach. Uneven coverage leaves spots that spoil or cure unevenly, so the mixture must be worked into every part of the meat.

“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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To Smoke a Mutton Ham