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To Boil a Ham

A method for boiling ham with sugar and water, cooling before skinning.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 3 ingredients
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Why it works: Ham and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 33% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,084 recipes. Both carry phenylacetaldehyde, which smells hawthorne, honey. The science ↓

To Boil a Ham

Oven, in the book's wordsA quick oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Wash the ham well.

  2. Soak the ham overnight in clear water if it is very salty.

  3. Determine the weight of the ham.

  4. Calculate cooking time: 15 minutes per pound.

  5. Place the ham in a large kettle.

  6. Cover it with cold water.

Cook

  1. Bring the water to a boil.

  2. Reduce the heat to let it simmer gently.

  3. After one hour, turn off the water.

  4. Add fresh boiling water.

  5. Add ½ cup of sugar for every 10 pounds of ham to the second water and continue boiling.

Finish

  1. Remove the ham.

  2. Let it cool before skinning or cutting.

  3. If serving hot, skin the ham immediately after removing it from the water.

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 + sugartop 33% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,084 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
Is the main cut being cooked, so its size sets the cooking time.
Sugar
Adds a little sweetness to the cooking water and the ham's flavor.

The step that matters

Reduce the heat to let it simmer gently. Boiling hard toughens the meat and can split the skin, while a gentle simmer cooks the ham evenly and keeps it tender and moist.

“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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