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Boiled and Baked Ham

A ham is boiled, coated with egg white and sugar or breadcrumbs, then baked until browned.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
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Why it works: Ham and egg are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 17% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 4,526 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Boiled and Baked Ham

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no oven temperature. The 400°F (200°C) in the steps was added when the recipe was transcribed, as a starting point.

Prepare

  1. Boil the ham until tender.

Coat and bake

  1. Cover the ham with the egg white.

  2. Sprinkle sugar or bread crumbs over the ham.

  3. Place the ham in a 400°F (200°C) oven and brown it.

  4. For a variation, cover with cake icing and brown it.

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 + eggtop 17% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together4,526 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Egg + sugartop 21% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together122,807 recipes

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

  3. 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
Main cut that is cooked until tender and then given a browned coating.
Raw egg white
Acts as a binder so the sugar or bread crumbs stick to the surface of the ham.
Sugar
Caramelises in the oven, adding sweetness and browning to the crust.
Bread crumbs
Form a crisp, browned crust on the outside of the ham.

The step that matters

Browning the coated ham in the oven. The coating needs enough heat to brown without burning. Sugar darkens quickly at high heat, so the ham should be watched closely while it browns.

“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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