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Beef Ham

Cured beef ham seasoned with sal-prunella, brown sugar, coarse sea salt, white pepper, cloves, nutmeg, and common salt, left to cure for 15 days.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 8 ingredients
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Why it works: Clove and nutmeg match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,686 recipes. Both carry estragole, which smells anise, licorice. The science ↓

Beef Ham

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare

  1. Rub a little common salt over the beef.

  2. Remove the bone from the beef.

Cure

  1. In 1-2 days, rub the sal-prunella, brown sugar, coarse sea salt, white pepper, cloves, and nutmeg into the beef.

  2. Strew ½ pound of common salt over the beef.

  3. Let it sit for 15 days, turning it daily.

Finish

  1. After 15 days, hang it up or boil it and let it cool in the water.

  2. Alternatively, bake it in a deep dish covered with a coarse paste.

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. Clove + nutmegtop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,686 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  2. White pepper + nutmegtop 13% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,375 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  3. Beef + nutmegtop 16% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together3,495 recipes

    Shared aroma: eucalyptol (eucalyptus, herbal).

  4. Beef + clovetop 18% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together5,462 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  5. Sugar + nutmegtop 20% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together23,364 recipes

    Shared aroma: 1-penten-3-one (fish, pungent).

Sugar and nutmeg barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 23,364 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

Beef
Is the meat being cured, so its texture and moisture change during the long salting.
Coarse sea salt
Draws moisture out of the meat and preserves it during the cure.
Common salt
Adds to the curing action, drawing moisture out and seasoning the meat.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and balances the harshness of the salt.
Cloves
Contributes warm aromatic flavour to the cured meat.
Nutmeg
Contributes warm aromatic flavour to the cured meat.

The step that matters

Turning the beef daily during the 15-day cure. Salt dissolves in the meat's moisture to form a brine that slowly penetrates inward. Turning the beef each day spreads the brine evenly, so no area is left under-salted and open to spoilage.

Swap the white pepper

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (beef, sugar, clove, nutmeg):

  1. Cinnamonfits better
  2. Allspicefits better
  3. Cardamomfits better
  4. White pepperthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against beef, sugar, clove, nutmeg. 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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