Name: Cheese and Ham
Ingredients: 1 cup white sauce; ½ cup chopped ham; ½ cup grated cheese; ½ teaspoon cayenne; toast for serving

Why it works: Ham and cheese work together. They rank in the top 15% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 303 recipes. Both carry gamma-nonanolactone, which smells coconut, sweet. The science ↓

Cheese and Ham

Ingredients

Directions

In a bowl, combine the white sauce, chopped ham, grated cheese, and cayenne. Mix well until all ingredients are combined.
Serve the mixture hot on slices of toast.

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 + cheesetop 15% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together303 recipes

Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).
Sauce + cheesetop 19% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together1,987 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).
Sauce + hamtop 22% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together1,314 recipes

Shared aroma: ethanol (alcoholic, ethereal).

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

What each ingredient does

White sauce: Provides a creamy, moist base that binds the ham and cheese together.
Grated cheese: Melts into the sauce to add richness and savoury flavour.
Chopped ham: Adds salty, savoury meat flavour and some chew to the mixture.

“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.