Why it works: Mutton and sugar work together. They rank in the top 34% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 726 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓
To Make Mutton Hams
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the cure
Cut the hind quarter of mutton like a ham.
Mix saltpetre, coarse sugar, and common salt.
Rub the mixture onto the mutton.
Place the mutton skin side down in a hollow tray.
Baste it every day for two weeks.
Smoke and finish
Roll it in sawdust.
Hang it in wood smoke for two weeks.
Boil it.
Hang it in a dry place.
Cut it into rashers.
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.
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Mutton + sugartop 34% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together726 recipes
Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Mutton
- The main meat, which is cured, smoked and dried into a ham-style cut.
- Saltpetre
- Helps preserve the meat and gives cured meat its characteristic pink colour.
- Common salt
- Draws moisture out of the meat and slows spoilage by microbes.
- Coarse sugar
- Softens the sharpness of the salt and balances the flavour of the cure.
The step that matters
Rub and baste the cure evenly. Salt and saltpetre penetrate meat slowly from the surface inward. Thorough rubbing and daily basting spread the cure evenly, so thin or missed areas do not spoil during the long cure.
“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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