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Country Pickled Ham

A ham cured with salt, saltpeter, and spices, then pickled in a garlic, onion, and bay leaf sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Garlic and onion match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 29,058 recipes. Both carry furaneol, which smells caramel, strawberry. The science ↓

Country Pickled Ham

Ingredients

Directions

Cure

  1. Rub the ham with coarse sea salt and saltpeter, then let it stand in a cold place for eight days, turning it in the salt juice daily.

Pickle

  1. In a large pot, boil the sliced onions, garlic, bay leaves, and black pepper in 4 quarts of water to make the pickling sauce, then cool the sauce.

  2. Pour the sauce over the ham, then let it sit in the sauce for twelve days.

Finish and smoke

  1. After twelve days, wash the ham in lukewarm water, then dry it.

  2. Smoke the ham for 10 to 12 days.

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. Garlic + oniontop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together29,058 recipes

    Shared aroma: furaneol (caramel, strawberry).

  2. Clove + peppertop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together17,451 recipes

    Shared aroma: ethyl octanoate (fruity, wine).

  3. Garlic + peppertop 8% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together27,090 recipes

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

  4. Clove + garlictop 10% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together11,368 recipes

    Shared aroma: linalool (floral, citrus).

  5. Pepper + oniontop 11% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together68,474 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2-isopropyl-3-methoxypyrazine (earthy, pea).

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 during the cure.
Saltpeter
Helps preserve the cured meat and gives it a rosy colour.
Garlic
Adds pungent aroma that carries into the meat during pickling.
Onions
Contribute savoury sweetness and aroma to the pickling sauce.
Bay leaves
Add a subtle herbal aroma to the pickling sauce.

The step that matters

Cool the sauce before pouring it over the ham. Hot liquid begins to cook the surface of the meat and can uneven the cure, so the sauce should be cooled before it touches the ham.

Swap the clove

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (ham, garlic, pepper, onion):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Parsleyfits better
  3. Celeryfits better
  4. Clovethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against ham, garlic, pepper, onion. 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.

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