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Westphalian Ham

A ham cured with salt, saltpetre, sugar, spices, and smoked over wood.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 10 ingredients
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Why it works: Ham and pepper are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 23% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 6,058 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Westphalian Ham

Ingredients

Directions

The book gives no cooking times; the times in the steps were added in transcription, so check for doneness rather than trusting the clock.

Cure the ham

  1. Cover the ham with dry salt for 24 hours.

  2. Boil together coarse sea salt, common salt, saltpetre, moist sugar, sal prunella, pounded juniper berries, and socho.

  3. Let the mixture cool, then submerge the cleaned ham in the brine.

  4. Cover the ham and let it sit for nearly a month, turning it twice a week.

  5. After a month, wipe the ham with a dry cloth.

Season and smoke

  1. Mix pounded pepper and bran, rub it into the ham's cavities and all over the surface.

  2. Hang the ham by a chimney where only wood is burned for 3 to 6 months to dry and smoke.

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. Ham + peppertop 23% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together6,058 recipes

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

  2. Sugar + peppertop 32% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together19,401 recipes

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

  3. Ham + sugartop 33% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,084 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

Sugar and pepper 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

Ham
Serves as the main cut that is cured, seasoned and slowly dried over smoke.
Coarse sea salt
Draws moisture out of the meat and helps preserve it during curing.
Common salt
Adds salinity and helps draw moisture from the meat during the cure.
Saltpetre
Helps preserve the meat's pink colour during long curing.
Moist sugar
Balances the saltiness and adds mild sweetness to the cured flavour.
Juniper berries
Adds a resinous, aromatic flavour to the cure.

The step that matters

Turning the ham in the brine. The ham must stay fully covered and be turned regularly so the brine penetrates evenly. Uneven contact lets some areas spoil or cure unevenly over the long soak.

“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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