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
Cure
Rub the leg of mutton daily with a mixture of brown sugar, coarse sea salt, and saltpetre for two weeks.
Smoke and dry
Hang the mutton to dry in wood smoke for an additional ten days.
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
- Coarse sea salt
- Draws moisture out of the meat and helps preserve it during curing.
- Saltpetre
- Helps preserve the meat and gives the cured flesh its characteristic pink colour.
- Brown sugar
- Adds a little sweetness that balances the saltiness of the cure.
The step that matters
Daily rubbing during the cure. Salt and cure need to reach the whole leg evenly. Rubbing the mixture in every day keeps the cure in contact with the surface and redistributes moisture, so the meat cures uniformly instead of spoiling at the surface or staying unevenly salted.
“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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