Why it works: Pepper and sugar are a kitchen classic. They rank in the top 32% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 19,401 recipes. Both carry 2-nonenal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓
A Kentucky Recipe for Curing Hams
Ingredients
Directions
Prepare the cure
Make a strong red pepper tea using the pods.
Moisten the salt with the pepper tea.
Mix the brown sugar into the moistened salt.
Rub the mixture thoroughly onto the hams.
Sprinkle 1 teaspoon of saltpetre on the fleshy side of each ham.
Cure and smoke
Let the hams stand in the salt for three weeks.
Smoke the hams with green hickory or red oak until they have a good color.
Pepper and store
Mix red and black pepper together, using about three-quarters black pepper.
Canvas the hams with the pepper mixture.
Wrap the hams in paper.
Place the wrapped hams in cotton bags.
Hang the bags in a cool, dry place.
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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Pepper + sugartop 32% of all pairsSmell alikelowCooked together19,401 recipes
Shared aroma: 2-nonenal (fatty, green).
Pepper and sugar barely smell alike, yet cooks put them together in 19,401 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
- Saltpetre
- Helps the cured meat keep its pink color and resists spoilage bacteria during curing.
- Brown sugar
- Adds sweetness and balances the sharpness of the salt.
- Red pepper
- Adds heat and aroma to the cure and the outer coating.
- Black pepper
- Adds sharp aroma and flavor to the pepper coating on the surface.
- Green hickory or red oak
- Adds smoke flavor and browning to the surface of the hams.
The step that matters
Let the hams stand in the salt for three weeks. The salt mixture must slowly penetrate the thick muscle to cure it evenly. Rushing this step leaves the centre under-cured and less safely preserved.
“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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