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Veal Hams

A veal leg cured with a mixture of hay salt, saltpetre, common salt, cinnamon, and juniper berries, then smoked and roasted.

From an old cookbook · modernised transcription
From a historical cookbook (Internet Archive) · 6 ingredients
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Why it works: Veal and cinnamon work together. They rank in the top 31% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 196 recipes. Both carry guaiacol, which smells smoky, sweet. The science ↓

Veal Hams

Ingredients

Directions

Cure

  1. Cut the leg of veal like a ham.

  2. Mix hay salt, saltpetre, common salt, cinnamon, and juniper berries.

  3. Rub the mixture onto the ham.

  4. Place the ham skin side down in a hollow tray.

  5. Baste the ham daily with the pickle for two weeks.

Smoke

  1. Hang the ham in wood smoke for another two weeks.

Cook

  1. Boil or parboil, then roast the ham.

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. Veal + cinnamontop 31% of all pairs
    Smell alikelow
    Cooked together196 recipes

    Shared aroma: guaiacol (smoky, sweet).

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

What each ingredient does

Veal leg
The main meat; its lean muscle firms and holds its shape through curing and cooking.
Common salt
Draws out moisture and preserves the meat while seasoning it.
Saltpetre
A curing agent that helps keep the meat pink and gives it a cured flavour.
Cinnamon
Adds warm, sweet aroma to the cure.
Juniper berries
Add a resinous, piney aroma that complements the cured meat.

The step that matters

Rubbing and basting the cure. Rubbing the cure evenly and keeping the ham skin side down in the tray lets brine collect and salt penetrate uniformly. Daily basting with the pickle keeps the surface moist and lets the cure work through the meat over the full two weeks.

“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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