Why it works: Ham and milk are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 23% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 1,089 recipes. Both carry gamma-nonanolactone, which smells coconut, sweet. The science ↓
To Boil a Ham
Ingredients
Directions
Cure and soak
Rub the ham with coarse sea salt.
Soak the ham in water for 4 days, rubbing it and changing the water daily.
Soak the ham in skimmed milk for 2 days.
Cook
Simmer the ham over low heat for 18 hours, splitting the cooking between two days.
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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Ham + milktop 23% of all pairsSmell alikemoderateCooked together1,089 recipes
Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Ham
- The main cut, whose dense muscle and connective tissue become tender through long, slow simmering.
- Coarse sea salt
- Draws moisture out of the meat and seasons it, firming the texture during curing.
The step that matters
Simmer over low heat. A gentle simmer keeps the liquid from boiling hard, which would toughen the meat and break it apart. Long, low heat slowly converts collagen in the connective tissue into gelatin, leaving the ham tender.
“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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