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 Ham, to Cure
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare
In cool weather, let the meat hang for 2 to 3 days.
Pound the curing ingredients together.
Cure
Rub the mixture thoroughly into the meat.
Place the meat in a cool, dry place to cure for several weeks.
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
- Sea salt
- Draws moisture out of the meat and helps preserve it during curing.
- Moist sugar
- Balances the salt's sharpness and adds sweetness to the cured flavour.
- Saltpetre
- Helps keep the meat's pink colour and inhibits spoilage during long curing.
The step that matters
Rubbing the mixture thoroughly into the meat. Salt cures by penetrating the meat, and uneven coverage leaves spots where spoilage can start and the cure cannot reach evenly.
“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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