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Cooking Ham

A ham cured by boiling, baking, saltpetre rub, beer-salt-sugar pickle, and 14‑day smoking.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Sugar and beer work together. They rank in the top 22% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 699 recipes. Both carry beta-damascenone, which smells apple, rose. The science ↓

Cooking Ham

Ingredients

Directions

Parboil and bake

  1. Boil the ham or hock for 15 minutes per pound.

  2. Transfer the ham to an oven and bake for another 15 minutes per pound.

Make the pickle

  1. Rub the ham with saltpetre.

  2. Mix bay salt, common salt, and brown sugar into the beer.

  3. Boil the mixture.

  4. Pour the mixture over the ham.

  5. Let the ham sit in the pickle for 14 days.

  6. Rub the ham twice daily.

Smoke

  1. Smoke the ham over a wood fire for 14 days, avoiding pine or fir wood.

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. Sugar + beertop 22% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together699 recipes

    Shared aroma: beta-damascenone (apple, rose).

  2. Ham + beertop 30% of all pairs
    Smell alikemoderate
    Cooked together25 recipes

    Shared aroma: gamma-nonanolactone (coconut, sweet).

  3. Ham + sugartop 33% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together1,084 recipes

    Shared aroma: phenylacetaldehyde (hawthorne, honey).

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

What each ingredient does

Saltpetre
Helps cure the meat, giving it a pink color and a preserved character.
Bay salt
Draws moisture out of the meat and seasons it while helping preserve it.
Common salt
Draws moisture out of the meat and seasons it while helping preserve it.
Brown sugar
Adds sweetness that balances the salt and supports browning.
Beer
Carries the salt, sugar and flavor into the ham as the pickle liquid.

The step that matters

Rub the ham twice daily. Salt moves into meat slowly by diffusion, so the cure spreads unevenly unless the surface is rubbed and redistributed regularly. Even coverage helps prevent thin, under-salted spots where spoilage can start during the long 14-day pickle.

“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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