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Baked Ham a LA Van Voast

A ham baked with cider, vinegar, mustard, brown sugar, and spices, served hot with cider sauce.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 13 ingredients
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Why it works: Carrot and parsley match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 1% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 8,053 recipes. Both carry 2,4-decadienal, which smells seaweed. The science ↓

Baked Ham a LA Van Voast

Oven, in the book's wordsA slow oven

Ingredients

Directions

Cook the ham

  1. Cook the ham as for boiled ham, adding carrot, onion, celery, parsley, cloves, allspice berries, and peppercorns to the water.

  2. Cool the ham in the cooking water, then remove it and take off the skin.

Glaze and bake

  1. Combine the bread crumbs, brown sugar, and mustard with enough vinegar to hold the mixture together, then spread it over the ham.

  2. Pour cider over the ham and bake for 1 hour at 300°F (150°C), basting every 10 minutes.

  3. Serve hot with cider sauce.

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. Carrot + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together8,053 recipes

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

  2. Carrot + celerytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together10,173 recipes

    Shared aroma: myristicin (spice, warm).

  3. Celery + parsleytop 1% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together6,810 recipes

    Shared aroma: 4'-methylacetophenone (bitter almond).

  4. Allspice + parsleytop 3% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,289 recipes

    Shared aroma: estragole (anise, licorice).

  5. Allspice + carrottop 5% of all pairs
    Smell alikestrong
    Cooked together1,021 recipes

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

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 that is cooked, cooled and then baked until heated through.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness and helps the glaze caramelise and brown during baking.
Bread crumbs
Absorb moisture and bind with the vinegar to form a spreadable crust on the ham.
Cider
Adds acidity and fruity flavour, and moistens the ham as it bakes and basts.
Mustard
Adds sharp flavour that balances the sweetness of the brown sugar glaze.

The step that matters

Basting every 10 minutes. Regular basting with the pan liquid keeps the surface moist and helps the glaze brown evenly without drying or scorching during the hour of baking.

Swap the onion

How well each one fits the dish's main ingredients (ham, allspice, carrot, bread, celery, sugar, parsley):

  1. Parsnipfits better
  2. Turnipfits better
  3. Mustardfits better
  4. Onionthe original

Fit is the average pairing score against ham, allspice, carrot, bread, celery, sugar, parsley. 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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