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 ↓
Mutton Uam
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare
Choose a fine-grained leg of wether-mutton and let it hang for two days.
Cure
In a stew-pan, mix the coarse sea salt, common salt, saltpetre, and coarse sugar; heat until hot.
Rub the mixture well into the ham.
Turn the ham in the mixture every day.
After four days, add 2 more ounces of common salt.
After twelve days, take it out, dry it, and hang it in wood smoke for a week.
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
- Coarse sea salt
- Draws moisture out of the meat and helps preserve it during curing.
- Common salt
- Seasons the meat and adds to the preserving effect of the cure.
- Saltpetre
- Helps the meat keep its colour and adds to the cure's preserving action.
- Coarse sugar
- Balances the saltiness and softens the harshness of the cure.
The step that matters
Turning the ham in the mixture every day. Salt penetrates unevenly, so the cure must be redistributed daily to reach all parts of the meat and prevent spoilage in spots that stay dry or uncovered.
“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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