Name: Another Receipt to Cure Ham
Ingredients: 1 cup coarse sea salt (formerly 'bay salt'); 1 cup common salt; 2 ounces saltpetre; 2 ounces black pepper; ½ pound common brown sugar; 1 quart beer

Why it works: Pepper and beer work together. They rank in the top 16% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 940 recipes. Both carry trans-2-nonenal, which smells cardboard, fatty. The science ↓

Another Receipt to Cure Ham

Ingredients

Directions

Cure the ham

Hang the ham for three days, sprinkling it with salt daily.
Make a pickle by boiling the coarse sea salt, common salt, saltpetre, black pepper, brown sugar, and beer together.
Pour the hot pickle over the ham.
Turn the ham in the pickle every day for three weeks.
After three weeks, wipe the ham dry and bury it in bran.

Smoke

Smoke the ham for a month over wood smoke, wrapping it in a coarse, strong wrapper.

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.

Pepper + beertop 16% of all pairs

Smell alikemoderate

Cooked together940 recipes

Shared aroma: trans-2-nonenal (cardboard, fatty).
Sugar + beertop 22% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together699 recipes

Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).
Pepper + sugartop 32% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together19,401 recipes

Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).

Pepper and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 19,401 recipes: they work on texture and structure more than aroma.

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: Draws moisture out of the meat and helps preserve it during curing.
Saltpetre: Helps preserve the meat and gives cured ham its characteristic pink colour.
Brown sugar: Adds sweetness and balances the salt in the cure.

The step that matters

Turn the ham in the pickle every day for three weeks. Salt and curing agents penetrate slowly and unevenly, so regular turning keeps the cure in contact with all surfaces and helps it reach the centre 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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Another Receipt to Cure Ham