Name: The Buckinghamshire Way of Curing Bacon
Ingredients: ½ pound saltpetre; 3-4 pounds common salt; 1 pound coarse sugar; 2 pounds salt for each ham; 6-7 pounds salt for two flitches

Why it works: Sugar and ham 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 ↓

The Buckinghamshire Way of Curing Bacon

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the cure

Rub the meat thoroughly with saltpetre.
Heat the common salt and sugar over the fire until hot.
Rub the hot mixture evenly over the bacon and hams.

Cure and dry

Place the bacon and hams skin-side down in a salting vessel.
Let them cure in the pickle for one month, turning them once or twice a week.
After curing, hang the hams and sides up to dry without extraordinary smoke.

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.

Sugar + hamtop 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

Saltpetre: Helps cure the meat and gives it a pink colour and cured flavour.
Common salt: Draws out moisture and seasons the meat, helping preserve it during curing.
Coarse sugar: Balances the saltiness and adds a mild sweetness to the cure.

The step that matters

Rubbing the hot salt and sugar mixture evenly. Uneven coverage leaves some areas under-cured and others over-salted. Even rubbing lets the salt penetrate the meat consistently across the bacon and hams.

“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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The Buckinghamshire Way of Curing Bacon