Skip to main content
Main

Boiled Ham

A ham boiled with sugar, mace, allspice, thyme, wine, and garnished with cloves or bread crumbs.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
Jump to recipe ↓

Why it works: Allspice and clove match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 7,874 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Boiled Ham

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the ham

  1. Soak the ham in cold water for 2 hours.

  2. Scrape the ham clean and remove the knuckle.

Cook

  1. Place the ham in a pot with a pinch of sugar, mace, allspice, thyme, and wine.

  2. Cover with water and boil for 4 hours per pound.

  3. Leave the ham in the liquid until cold.

Finish

  1. Remove the rind, wipe with 2 clean cloths, and dot with cloves or cover with bread crumbs.

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. Allspice + clovetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together7,874 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. Allspice + thymetop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,077 recipes

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

  3. Thyme + clovetop 2% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together4,108 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Mace + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  5. Mace + allspicetop 7% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,189 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

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

What each ingredient does

Ham
Provides the main meat, which becomes tender through long, gentle simmering.
Wine
Adds acidity and aroma that flavour the cooking liquid and the meat.
Allspice
Adds warm aromatic flavour to the cooking liquid.

The step that matters

Boil for 4 hours per pound. A gentle, sustained simmer is needed to make the tough connective tissue in the ham tender. Boiling too hard can toughen the meat and dry out its surface, so keep the liquid at a steady simmer for the full time.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (ham, sugar, allspice, thyme, wine, clove):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Marjoramfits better
  3. Winter savoryfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against ham, sugar, allspice, thyme, wine, clove. 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.

More boiled ham recipes

Cold 4 See all 328 →

You might also like

Tomato SoupTomato Soup526 recipesBrown BreadBrown Bread461 recipesMutton BrothMutton Broth292 recipesYorkshire PuddingYorkshire Pudding264 recipes