Why it works: Mutton and sugar work together. They rank in the top 34% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 726 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓
Mutton Ham
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare
Choose a fine-grained leg of mutton and cut it into ham shape.
Hang the ham for two days.
Cure
Mix bay salt, common salt, saltpetre, and coarse sugar in a pot and heat until hot.
Rub the mixture well into the ham.
Turn the ham in the liquid every day.
After four days, add 2 ounces more common salt.
After twelve days, take the ham out, dry it, and hang it in wood smoke for a week.
Serve
Serve the ham in slices with stewed cabbage, mashed potatoes, or eggs.
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.
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Mutton + sugartop 34% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together726 recipes
Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs
What each ingredient does
- Wether mutton leg
- Provides the meat that is salted, cured and smoked into ham.
- Bay salt
- Draws moisture out of the meat and seasons it during curing.
- Common salt
- Preserves the meat by drawing out water and seasoning it through the cure.
- Saltpetre
- Helps preserve the meat and keeps its colour during curing.
- Coarse sugar
- Balances the saltiness and adds sweetness to the cured meat.
The step that matters
Turn the ham in the liquid every day. Salt cures unevenly if the brine does not reach all surfaces. Turning the ham daily keeps the cure evenly distributed so the meat is preserved throughout rather than spoiling in spots.
“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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