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Cold Ham

Cold Ham is thin slices of ham served in a sauce of currant jelly, butter, pepper, and thick cream.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 9 ingredients
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Why it works: Flour and rye match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 8% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,320 recipes. Both carry isobutyraldehyde, which smells malty, green. The science ↓

Cold Ham

Ingredients

Directions

Make the sauce

  1. Melt the currant jelly, butter, and pepper in a saucepan.

  2. Add thin slices of ham and let it boil for 1 minute.

  3. For a brown sauce, boil ham scraps in a stewpan with a little water.

  4. Strain the liquid and add thick cream.

  5. Thicken with browned flour rubbed smooth with butter.

Finish and serve

  1. Boil slices of ham in this sauce and serve with browned potatoes or potato cakes and toasted rye bread.

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. Flour + ryetop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,320 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  2. Butter + creamtop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together41,516 recipes

    Shared aroma: delta-dodecalactone (sweet, creamy).

  3. Pepper + potatotop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together8,305 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

  4. Potato + ryetop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together75 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  5. Butter + flourtop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together124,287 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Butter and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 124,287 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

Currant jelly
Adds sweetness and a fruity tang that balances the salty ham.
Thick cream
Adds richness and body, softening the sauce's flavour and texture.
Browned flour
Thickens the sauce so it coats the ham slices.
Ham
Provides the savoury meat flavour that the sauce carries.

The step that matters

Thicken with browned flour rubbed smooth with butter. Flour added directly to hot liquid forms lumps. Rubbing it smooth with butter first lets it disperse evenly, so the sauce thickens without clumps.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (butter, pepper, ham, cream, flour, potato, rye):

  1. Lemonfits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Cherryfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against butter, pepper, ham, cream, flour, potato, rye. 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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