Skip to main content
Main

To Stew a Ham

A slow‑cooked ham stew with bacon, stock, herbs, onions, carrots, Madeira and port wine.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 11 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Parsley and carrot match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

To Stew a Ham

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the ham

  1. Soak the ham in lukewarm water for 12 hours.

  2. Drain the ham and scrape the rind.

Stew

  1. Place the ham in a stew pan with the bacon, stock, parsley, sweet herbs, onions, carrots, allspice, and black pepper.

  2. Add the Madeira and port wine.

  3. Cover the ham with bacon slices and a sheet of white paper.

  4. Stew for 8 to 10 hours, depending on the size of the ham.

Finish the sauce and serve

  1. Remove the rind.

  2. Strain the sauce.

  3. Skim the sauce.

  4. Boil the sauce until reduced to a glaze.

  5. Pour the glaze around the ham or serve with a preferred sauce.

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.

  1. Parsley + carrottop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

  2. Parsley + peppertop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together34,122 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  3. Parsley + allspicetop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,289 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  4. Allspice + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,395 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  5. Carrot + allspicetop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,021 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-phellandrene (minty, terpene).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Ham
Forms the main body of the dish, becoming tender during long, slow stewing.
Fat bacon
Adds fat and savoury flavour to the stewing liquid and covers the ham to keep it moist.
Onions
Release sweetness and aromatic flavour into the stock during the long stew.
Madeira wine
Adds acidity and depth, and reduces into the sweet-savoury glaze.
Port wine
Adds sweetness and body, concentrating into the reduced glaze.

The step that matters

Boil the sauce until reduced to a glaze. Reducing concentrates the sugars and flavours of the stock and wines. Boiling too hard or too long can scorch the sugars and make the glaze bitter, so it should be watched as it thickens.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (ham, parsley, carrot, allspice, pepper, madeira wine, port wine):

  1. Shallotfits better
  2. Capsicumfits better
  3. Turnipfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against ham, parsley, carrot, allspice, pepper, madeira wine, port wine. Candidates are from the same food group and used in at least 100 recipes.

“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.

You might also like

Carrot SoupCarrot Soup134 recipesTomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipes