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Boiled Ham

A ham boiled with cider vinegar, cloves, bread crumbs, currant jelly, and parsley.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 7 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 6% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,768 recipes. Both carry cuminaldehyde, which smells Spicy, cumin. The science ↓

Boiled Ham

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the ham

  1. Soak the ham overnight in warm water.

  2. Scrape the ham.

  3. Clean the ham thoroughly.

  4. Place the ham in a large pot filled with cold water.

  5. Simmer the ham for 30 minutes without boiling.

  6. Drain the water.

  7. Add more cold water.

  8. Add 1 pint of cider vinegar.

Boil and finish

  1. Cook the ham for 3 hours after it starts boiling, plus 30 minutes for each additional pound, ensuring it never boils hard.

  2. Remove the ham.

  3. Peel off the skin.

  4. Insert whole cloves into the ham.

  5. Cover the ham with fine bread crumbs.

  6. Bake the ham for 30 minutes.

  7. Decorate the bone with a cut paper frill.

  8. Cover the bone with currant jelly and parsley.

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 + parsleytop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,768 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  2. Cider + vinegartop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,431 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4-ethyl-2-methoxyphenol (smoky, clove).

  3. Ham + breadtop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,536 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-acetyl-1-pyrroline (popcorn, roasted).

  4. Cider + curranttop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together500 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

  5. Vinegar + curranttop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together693 recipes

    Shared aroma: isoamyl acetate (banana, pear).

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

What each ingredient does

Ham
Is the main protein; long gentle simmering makes it tender and succulent.
Cider vinegar
Adds a gentle acidity that brightens the flavour of the cooking liquid.
Fine bread crumbs
Form a crust on the surface of the ham that browns during baking.
Currant jelly
Adds sweetness and a glossy glaze to the finished ham.

The step that matters

Keep the water below a boil. Simmering gently keeps meat tender and juicy, while a hard boil toughens the muscle fibres and can cause the ham to break apart.

Swap the currant

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (ham, cider, vinegar, clove, bread, parsley):

  1. Applefits better
  2. Figfits better
  3. Plumfits better
  4. Currantthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against ham, cider, vinegar, clove, bread, parsley. 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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