Name: Ham Porcupine
Ingredients: 1 boiled ham; cloves

Why it works: Ham and clove are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 18% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,666 recipes. Both carry gamma-decalactone, which smells peach, creamy. The science ↓

Ham Porcupine

Ingredients

1 boiled ham
cloves

Directions

Peel the boiled ham.
Stick cloves all over the ham.
Serve the ham whole.

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.

Ham + clovetop 18% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together1,666 recipes

Shared aroma: gamma-decalactone (peach, creamy).

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

What each ingredient does

Boiled ham: Forms the main body of the dish and provides its savory, meaty flavor.
Cloves: Add a warm, aromatic spice flavor to the surface of the ham.

“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.