Name: To Cure Hams and Drying Beef
Ingredients: 100 pounds of meat; 7 pounds of coarse sea salt; 5 pounds of brown sugar; 4 ounces of saltpetre; 1 ounce of saleratus; water (enough to cover the meat, about 4 gallons)

Why it works: Meat and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 34% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 2,866 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

To Cure Hams and Drying Beef

Ingredients

100 pounds of meat
7 pounds of coarse sea salt
5 pounds of brown sugar
4 ounces of saltpetre
1 ounce of saleratus
water (enough to cover the meat, about 4 gallons)

Directions

Make the brine

Dissolve the salt, brown sugar, saltpetre, and saleratus in enough water to cover the meat.

Cure

Pack the meat in a cask without any additional salt and pour the brine over it.
Let it stand for about six weeks.

Smoke and hang

After six weeks, remove the meat and smoke it.
Hang the hams in the smokehouse with the legs downward.

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.

Meat + sugartop 34% of all pairs

Smell alikelow

Cooked together2,866 recipes

Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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 seasons it, helping preserve the cured meat.
Brown sugar: Adds sweetness and balances the saltiness of the cure.
Saltpetre: Helps preserve the meat's pink colour and inhibits spoilage bacteria during the long cure.
Saleratus: Raises the brine's alkalinity, which affects how the cure works on the meat.

The step that matters

Keeping the meat fully submerged in brine for the whole six weeks. Any meat left above the brine can spoil or cure unevenly, because salt penetrates and preserves only where it is in contact with the brine.

“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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To Cure Hams and Drying Beef