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York Ham

York Ham is a ham simmered with herbs, spices, and vegetables in stock.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 22 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 ↓

York Ham

Oven, in the book's wordsA gentle oven

Ingredients

Directions

Prepare the ham

  1. Soak the ham in plenty of cold water for 24 hours.

  2. Scrape and wash the ham well.

  3. Place the ham in a large pot, skin side up, and cover with cold water.

  4. Bring to a boil slowly, then simmer for 1 hour.

  5. Remove the ham, wash it in cold water, and return it to the pot.

Simmer in stock

  1. Cover the ham with stock instead of water.

  2. Add garlic, onion, carrots, turnips, celery, mustard seed, sugar, cloves, ginger, laurel leaf, and parsley.

  3. Simmer gently until done, allowing 26 minutes per pound from boiling in the stock.

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. Parsley + garlictop 4% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together9,308 recipes

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

  3. Parsley + clovetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,768 recipes

    Shared aroma: cuminaldehyde (Spicy, cumin).

  4. Clove + macetop 6% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together8,400 recipes

    Shared aroma: methyleugenol (clove, spice).

  5. Parsley + oniontop 9% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25,843 recipes

    Shared aroma: 2,4-decadienal (seaweed).

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

What each ingredient does

Ham
Is the main cut being cooked, so its long soak and simmer set the texture of the meat.
Sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the ham's surface take on a richer flavour.
Onion
Contributes savoury aromatic flavour to the stock the ham cooks in.

The step that matters

Simmer gently until done. A rolling boil toughens the meat and can break it apart, while gentle simmering lets the connective tissue soften slowly and the ham cook evenly through.

Swap the mace

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (parsley, clove, garlic, sugar, ham, flour, onion):

  1. Thymefits better
  2. Capersfits better
  3. Marjoramfits better
  4. Macethe original

Fit is the average pairing score against parsley, clove, garlic, sugar, ham, flour, 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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