Skip to main content
Main

Hams, Bacon, &C

A joint of meat, basted with pickle, is baked under a flour-and-water crust with suet and water.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 4 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Meat and beef are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 12% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,533 recipes. Both carry 1-octen-3-one, which smells mushroom, metallic. The science ↓

Hams, Bacon, &C

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. Baste the meat with pickle every day for a period.

  2. Wash the meat in cold spring water and tie it with packthread.

  3. Place the meat in a deep earthen pan, ensuring a 2-3 inch space around it.

  4. Strew the chopped suet over the meat and pour water into the pan.

Bake and serve

  1. Cover the pan with a thin crust made of flour and water.

  2. Bake in a 400°F (200°C) oven for four hours.

  3. Remove the crust and wash the meat's surface with the baking liquor.

  4. Allow the meat to cool before serving.

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. Meat + beeftop 12% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together2,533 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-octen-3-one (mushroom, metallic).

  2. Beef + flourtop 25% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together10,677 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

  3. Meat + flourtop 28% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together5,529 recipes

    Shared aroma: isobutyraldehyde (malty, green).

Beef and flour barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 10,677 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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

What each ingredient does

Fresh beef suet
Melts during baking, adding fat that keeps the meat moist and flavourful.
Flour and water crust
Forms a sealed covering that traps steam and moisture around the meat as it bakes.

The step that matters

Sealing the flour crust. A thin, unbroken flour and water crust traps steam and moisture inside the pan, so the meat cooks gently and stays juicy rather than drying out in the oven.

“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.

You might also like

Roast BeefRoast Beef211 recipesBeef LoafBeef Loaf175 recipesCorned BeefCorned Beef87 recipesBeef BrothBeef Broth67 recipes